Senior Optical Engineering Manager

Lambda, The Superintelligence 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 superintelligence. One person, one GPU.

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

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 interconnectivity. 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.