Senior Optical Engineering Manager at Lambda

About this role

Lambda , The Cloud, is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers. Our customers range from AI researchers to enterprises and hyperscalers. Lambda's mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give everyone the power of . One person, one GPU.

If you'd like to build the world's best AI cloud, join us.

Lambda, The Cloud, is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers. Our customers range from AI researchers to enterprises and hyperscalers. Lambda's mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give everyone the power of . One person, one GPU.
Our vision is bold and is not an incremental exercise. We will continually re-evaluate and reinvent our current ways of working and the automation underneath all of it, while operating the existing network flawlessly for all customer workloads.
Lambda has 10x'd over the last three years, and the network engineering organization is scaling to match. We're looking for an Optical Engineering Manager to lead building our backbone and customer . This connectivity is going to play a critical role to ensure a flawless customer connectivity experience to our GPU cloud infrastructure. We're looking for an experienced leader with deep technical expertise to own optical based outcomes end to end — and to build the organization that delivers it. You'll hire and grow a talented team engineers, automate everything we do, shape team culture, and partner with technical leadership to deliver other mechanisms needed to stay ahead of our scale ambitions.
This role will report to the Senior Director of Capacity Delivery, working alongside a highly capable and passionate team of engineers.
If you'd like to join a great team of customer obsessed engineers building the world's best AI cloud, come join us.
What You'll Do


Own optical networking planning, delivery and operation end to end — and be accountable for capacity landing ahead of demand


Build and lead the organization that delivers it: hire, develop and retain engineers and the leaders who manage them, and design the team structure as the org grows


Set the multi-year technical strategy for optical capacity automation to ensure it continually scales


Convert manual process into durable software — the goal is a capacity pipeline that runs without heroics, not a better-organised set of runbooks


Own the operational bar for your org: how capacity work is planned, reviewed, shipped, measured and learned from when it goes wrong


Manage through leads and senior ICs, developing both — regular 1:1s, clear performance feedback, growth planning, and sponsorship of meaningful work


Partner and support our Interconnect team who negotiate, acquire and coordinate on external connectivity


Partner with Principal Engineers and technical leadership to maintain a high engineering bar across design, code quality and operational reliability


Partner with Infrastructure, Supply Chain, Data Center Operations, Product and Finance to align capacity roadmaps, forecast demand and manage long-lead dependencies


Represent your org's work and technical direction to senior leadership, and to enterprise customers and partners where appropriate


Contribute to org-wide engineering process improvements — how we plan, how we ship, how we learn from incidents


You


Have 5+ years of optical engineering management experience


Proven track record of building and scaling engineering organizations that deliver mission-critical, high-performance cloud connectivity serving millions of users


Foster a data driven, automation first, high velocity organization


Familiarity designing, building, scaling and operating large-scale networks


Strong automation skills and track record accelerating a business delivery velocity on a large scale


Have a track record of building high-performing teams in fast-moving, technically demanding environments


Are skilled at translating ambiguous business and product goals into clear team priorities and executable engineering plans


Show strong judgment about when to go deep technically, when to delegate, and when to escalate


Track record of successful project and product delivery in fast-paced, high-pressure environments


Excellent communicator both written and verbal. You leverage high quality written artifacts to inform high quality decision making and get approval on problems and solution opportunities


Nice to Have


Experience in GPU cloud, HPC, or AI/ML infrastructure environments


Familiarity with large-scale data center or cloud networking — fabric build-out, capacity modelling, or network supply chain


Experience with infrastructure capacity forecasting and long-lead hardware planning


Prior experience at a high-growth infrastructure or cloud company


Salary Range Information
The annual salary range for this position has been set based on market data and other factors. However, a salary higher or lower than this range may be appropriate for a candidate whose qualifications differ meaningfully from those listed in the job description.

About Lambda


Founded in 2012, with 500+ employees, and growing fast


Our investors notably include TWG Global, US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), Andra Capital, SGW, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners, NVIDIA, Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron, Wiwynn, Gradient Ventures, Mercato Partners, SVB, 1517, and Crescent Cove


We have research papers accepted at top machine learning and graphics conferences, including NeurIPS, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, and TOG


Our values are publicly available: https://lambda.ai/careers


We offer generous cash & equity compensation


Health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents


Wellness and commuter stipends for select roles


401k Plan with 2% company match (USA employees)


Flexible paid time off plan that we all actually use


Equal Opportunity Employer
Lambda is an Equal Opportunity employer. Applicants are considered without regard to race, color, religion, creed, national origin, age, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation and identity, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship, or any other factors prohibited by local, state, or federal law.