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.

We are 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.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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

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

Benefits:

• 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