---
title: 'Principal Network Engineer at Lambda'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-network-engineer-lambda-bellevue-cc446qzny6m9'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-13'
---

# Principal Network Engineer at Lambda

- **Company:** Lambda
- **Location:** Bellevue, WA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/lambda/a6f698ce-4efb-42c1-b2b0-09d8b44b3287

## 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.

*Note: This position requires presence in our Bellevue or San Francisco office location 4 days per week; Lambda’s designated work from home day is currently Tuesday.

You will be joining a team of highly capable software, hardware and network engineers building one of the largest AI training and inference networks in the world. You'll collaborate with people across Lambda to deliver novel and inventive solutions that meet the highest standards for safety, security, availability and performance - at the lowest possible cost for our customers. You will experience an inclusive and inventive culture that welcomes bold ideas and empowers you to own them from concept to production.

Our vision is bold and is not an incremental exercise. We will continually re-evaluate and reinvent our current fabric topology, routing design and the automation underneath all of it, while operating the existing network flawlessly for all customer workloads. This role will report to the VP of Cloud and AI Networking, 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 the multi-year technical strategy for Lambda's network — fabric, backbone and edge — and everything in between.
- Set the technical direction and standards other engineers design, build and operate against.
- Own high-level technical relationships with enterprise customers, guiding mission-critical projects
- Adept at influencing without authority across teams, and applying high quality technical judgment under ambiguity.
- Resolve any technical ambiguity that spans organisational boundaries — between network, hardware, platform and product teams
- Go deep when the hardest problems demand it — into the packet path, the routing table, the vendor's firmware, the code. You are hands-on.
- Drive the technical work end to end: shape the vision, define high- and low-level design, then work alongside the teams delivering it
- Raise the bar of the engineers around you through mentorship, design review and hiring
- Operate what you build. You'll take part in day 2 operations and the on-call rotation, because the fastest feedback loop between design and reality runs through the pager
- Serve as the senior technical voice with our largest customers on mission-critical projects, and carry what you learn there back into Lambda's roadmap
- Identify new opportunities to delight our customers, like novel new ways to improve availability or performance or even developing new products.

You

- 8+ years in relevant domains like cloud computing, systems engineering, and large-scale network infrastructure
- Experience of design, build and operation of production large scale Data Center or Cloud networks
- Experience of design, build and operation of software defined networking services and how to build distributed systems to the highest level of availability
- Have led through the implementation of large production-scale networking projects
- Experience building distributed network systems and services at scale
- Have experience with cloud providers networking (such as AWS, GCP, OCI)
- Deep expertise in datacenter, backbone and internet protocols and technology
- Experience building and optimizing networks for the best possible customer experience (lowest latency, fastest convergence, most available networks)
- Are comfortable on the Linux command line, and have an understanding of the Linux networking stack and internals
- Production automation skills in Python and a configuration management tool, working with network APIs and source control
- Production experience with multiple network gear vendors (Arista, Juniper, Cisco, Cumulus/SONiC, Opengear)
- Experience with Networking Monitoring stacks (Datadog, Clickhouse, Grafana, Prometheus, gNMI, OTel)
- 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

- Hands-on experience with HPC/AI networking: RoCEv2 and/or InfiniBand (congestion control, virtual lanes, partitions), GPUDirect RDMA, and the behaviour of collective communication at scale
- Experience with the network characteristics of large distributed training workloads
- Experience building distributed network systems and services at scale
- Experience with public cloud provider networking (AWS, GCP, OCI) and automating network configuration within it, using tools like Terraform, Ansible or Salt
- Experience with software defined networking
- Familiarity with modern network monitoring and telemetry — Prometheus, Grafana, gNMI, OpenTelemetry, or equivalents
- Experience with source-of-truth and IPAM tooling such as Netbox
- Experience with DWDM and SD-WAN
- Understanding of data center power, space and cooling trade-offs and their impact on topology choices
- Experience with virtualization technology and with load balancers

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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