---
title: 'Director, Data Center Equipment Category Manager at Lambda'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/director-data-center-equipment-category-manager-lambda-san-jose-cm829306krc8'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-08'
---

# Director, Data Center Equipment Category Manager at Lambda

- **Company:** Lambda
- **Location:** San Jose, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-11-03
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Lambda/c790ba79-6a5d-477e-a251-37858ea64205

## Job description

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.

## What You'll Do

- Lead and develop a team of category managers across electrical, mechanical, and modular equipment, while personally owning Lambda's most critical categories, sourcing events, and negotiations
- Own the multi-year category strategy for Lambda's datacenter infrastructure equipment — transformers, MV/LV switchgear, generators, UPS, busway, power distribution, chillers, CDUs, air handling and liquid cooling systems, and prefabricated and modular power and cooling solutions
- Secure supply in a constrained market — reserve manufacturing slots, negotiate capacity commitments and framework agreements, and align supplier capacity with Lambda's multi-site demand forecast
- Lead end-to-end sourcing events (RFI, RFP, RFQ) from specification through supplier selection, award, and contract execution
- Serve as Lambda's lead negotiator on the highest-value equipment agreements — master supply agreements, pricing, lead times, warranties, liquidated damages, and performance guarantees — partnering with Legal and Finance on terms
- Partner with Design, Engineering, Construction, and Development to standardize specifications and basis-of-design across sites, driving volume aggregation and repeatable buys
- Sequence equipment awards and deliveries against live construction schedules to protect the critical path, and manage expediting, factory witness testing, logistics, and storage
- Own the owner-furnished vs. contractor-furnished equipment strategy, including installation, warranty, and commissioning interfaces with general contractors and EPCs
- Deliver systematic cost reduction through should-cost and total-cost-of-ownership models, design-to-cost, value engineering, and index-based pricing for commodities like copper and steel
- Build strategic partnerships with OEMs, integrators, and manufacturer representatives, and qualify new and second-source suppliers to reduce concentration risk
- Own supplier performance management — quality, on-time delivery, and safety — through scorecards, factory audits, and executive business reviews
- Identify and mitigate supply chain risks — lead time volatility, tariffs, commodity pricing, single-source exposure, and geopolitical disruption — and maintain contingency plans
- Set standards for category governance, contract templates, and spend and supplier data that scale with Lambda's growth
- Deliver executive-level briefings on category strategy, market conditions, supply risk, and savings performance

You

- Have 10+ years in strategic sourcing, procurement, or category management, with at least 5 years focused on datacenter, mission-critical, energy, or heavy industrial electrical and mechanical equipment
- Hold a Bachelor's degree in Supply Chain Management, Engineering, Business, Finance, or a related field, or have equivalent experience
- Have 5+ years of people leadership managing category managers or sourcing professionals, while staying hands-on in sourcing strategy and negotiations yourself
- Have owned multi-year category strategies for high-spend, supply-constrained equipment categories with material cost and continuity-of-supply impact
- Know the datacenter equipment supply base — major OEMs, integrators, and their manufacturing capacity, lead times, and pricing dynamics
- Are recognized as a lead negotiator — you have personally closed large master supply agreements and capacity commitments, not directed someone else to
- Have sequenced long-lead equipment against a live construction schedule and worked shoulder to shoulder with design, engineering, and construction teams
- Have set process, policy, or governance standards that an organization adopted
- Brief and persuade executives comfortably, internally and across the supplier base, and can build the business case that earns the decision
- Operate well in ambiguity, on compressed timelines, in a supply-constrained market

## Nice to Have

- Experience at a hyperscaler, AI cloud, colocation provider, or datacenter developer
- Experience on the OEM or integrator side — sales, commercial, or supply chain at an electrical or mechanical equipment manufacturer
- Hands-on experience with prefabricated and modular power or cooling solutions
- Experience with high-density AI infrastructure, including liquid cooling and CDUs
- Engineering background or technical fluency in electrical distribution and cooling systems
- Experience standing up a category management function or team where little existed

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.

## About Lambda

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Lambda builds supercomputers and cloud infrastructure for training and deploying large-scale AI models, from single GPUs to gigawatt-scale AI factories.
- **Entity Type**: Private (funding stage not publicly disclosed; founded by ML engineers)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2012
- **Founders**: Stephen Balaban and Michael Balaban

## Core Business
- Primary industry: AI infrastructure / cloud computing for machine learning.
- Target customers: Frontier AI labs building large foundation models, hyperscalers scaling global AI infrastructure, and enterprises deploying AI in regulated industries (B2B, Enterprise).
- Mission: “Make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give everyone in America the power of superintelligence” (also “One person, one GPU”).

## Products & Services
- **The Superintelligence Cloud**: A suite of cloud computing offerings specifically built for AI workloads, including:
  - **GPU Instances**: On-demand NVIDIA HGX B200, H100, and GB300 NVL72 instances for prototyping and testing.
  - **Managed Clusters**: Dedicated, single-tenant clusters (e.g., NVIDIA GB300 NVL72, HGX B200/H100) with full management and co-engineering from Lambda’s team.
  - **1-Click Clusters™**: Rapidly deployable clusters for training and inference.
  - **Superclusters**: Large-scale AI factories integrating high-density power, liquid cooling, and high-bandwidth interconnects.
- **AI Infrastructure Hardware**: Modular AI factory designs and NVIDIA-based systems for on-premise or colocation deployment.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding not publicly available; revenue not disclosed.
- **Notable Customers/Partners**: “World’s most advanced AI organizations” (frontier labs, hyperscalers, regulated enterprises). Leadership includes former executives from cloud and networking companies.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring across engineering, storage, security, and procurement roles; building AI factories at gigawatt scale; SOC 2 Type II certified; expanding from San Francisco to San Jose, CA.

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI‑First DNA**: 100% of engineering, operations, and support dedicated to AI – founded by ML engineers in 2012.
- **Single‑Tenant Isolation**: Shared‑nothing architecture for security and performance, with hardware‑level isolation.
- **Full‑Stack Expertise**: Co‑engineering from the same team building the infrastructure, enabling deep optimization for large training runs.
- **Hacker Culture**: Rooted in the Noisebridge hackerspace values of do‑ocracy, low ego, and “be excellent to each other.”
- **Performance**: Rack‑scale NVIDIA systems (GB300, B200, H100) with high‑speed interconnects (NVIDIA Quantum‑2 InfiniBand).

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling infrastructure to support the next generation of superintelligence, including gigawatt‑scale AI factories.
- Enabling frontier labs to train trillion‑parameter models and serve billions of tokens in production.
- Expanding compliance and security capabilities for regulated industries.
- Growing the cloud platform (The Superintelligence Cloud) as the primary go‑to‑market offering.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Hacker ethos (Noisebridge roots), low ego, no yelling, no politics, no crypto. Values: build, move fast, care, be excellent to each other.
- **Work Environment**: Fast‑paced, high‑change, outcome‑focused. Emphasis on technical excellence and curiosity. Anonymous feedback encouraged.
- **Interview Process**: Clear, structured steps (recruiter chat → hiring manager → technical assessment → panel interviews → reference/offer). Pedigree is not everything; focus on what you’ve built.
- **Location & Remote**: Offices in San Francisco and San Jose, CA. FAQ page addresses remote/hybrid policy (details not provided in available snippets); some roles appear on‑site.
- **Perks**: Benefits, time off, and other perks are listed on the careers site (specifics not extracted here).

## Sources
1. [lambda.ai/about](https://lambda.ai/about)
2. [lambda.ai/](https://lambda.ai/)
3. [lambda.ai/careers](https://lambda.ai/careers)
4. [lambda.ai/leadership](https://lambda.ai/leadership)

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