Senior Software Engineer - Core Cloud Platform

Lambda•San Francisco, CA

3d•$296,000 - $346,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Senior Software Engineer on Lambda’s Core Cloud Platform team, you will build the control-plane systems that power Lambda’s GPU cloud. The team owns core platform capabilities across compute lifecycle, bare metal orchestration, maintenance actions, deployment readiness, reliability, and operational tooling. You will work on systems that turn physical GPU infrastructure into reliable, customer-facing cloud capacity: APIs, workflows, orchestration layers, schedulers, and operational surfaces for instance lifecycle, host reclaim, validation, maintenance, and safe regional deployments. This role is a strong fit for engineers who enjoy distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, operational excellence, and working close to the hardware/software boundary.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree or equivalent working experience.
Have 6+ years of professional software engineering experience building production backend or distributed systems.
Are strong in Python, Go, or a similar backend/system language.
Have experience designing and operating APIs, workflow engines, schedulers, orchestration services, or other distributed systems.
Understand reliability fundamentals: fault tolerance, idempotency, retries, state machines, failure handling, and production debugging.
Have experience with cloud or cloud-like infrastructure primitives such as compute, networking, storage, capacity management, identity, or fleet operations.
Are comfortable with Linux, containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure automation, and service deployment patterns.
Have owned production services, participated in on-call, and improved systems based on operational learnings.
Care about testability, CI/CD, observability, metrics, logging, alerting, and supportable operations.
Can take ambiguous infrastructure problems and drive them to clear designs, implementation plans, and production outcomes.
Communicate clearly across engineering, product, support, infrastructure teams, and leadership.

Nice To Haves

Experience building cloud control planes, compute platforms, schedulers, or infrastructure orchestration systems.
Experience with bare metal, GPU infrastructure, HPC, Kubernetes, Slurm, or large-scale AI/ML infrastructure.
Experience with host lifecycle, provisioning, validation, firmware, BMC/Redfish, fleet management, or maintenance workflows.
Familiarity with Temporal, Airflow, event-driven systems, or durable workflow orchestration.
Networking experience with VPCs, firewalls, SDN, InfiniBand, routing, or distributed systems networking.
Security-minded engineering experience, including identity, authorization, audit logging, attestation, or tenant isolation.

Responsibilities

Build and operate core cloud platform services for compute lifecycle, bare metal hosts, capacity, placement, and maintenance workflows.
Design reliable APIs, backend services, state machines, and orchestration systems that power Lambda’s GPU cloud.
Work on bare metal lifecycle systems including launch, terminate, restart/reboot, host reclaim, validation, quarantine, and return-to-pool workflows.
Improve deployment, observability, testing, alerting, runbooks, and operational readiness for business-critical control-plane services.
Debug complex production issues across distributed services, infrastructure dependencies, networking, and cloud workflows.
Partner with infrastructure, networking, fleet, security, support, and product teams to define cross-system contracts and deliver end-to-end cloud capabilities.
Contribute to architecture, design docs, code reviews, incident follow-through, and mentoring across the team.