Optical Engineering Manager

Lambda, The Superintelligence Cloud, is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers. Their 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.

Our vision is bold and not an incremental exercise. We 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 critical to ensure a flawless customer connectivity experience to our GPU cloud infrastructure.

You'll hire and grow a talented team of engineers, automate everything we do, shape team culture, and partner with technical leadership to deliver mechanisms needed to stay ahead of our scale ambitions.

This role reports to the Senior Director of Capacity Delivery, working alongside a highly capable and passionate team of engineers.

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 leaders, and design the team structure as the organization grows
• Set the multi-year technical strategy for optical capacity automation to ensure it continually scales
• Convert manual processes into durable software—aiming for a capacity pipeline that runs without heroics, not just better-organized runbooks
• Own the operational bar for your organization: how capacity work is planned, reviewed, shipped, measured, and learned from when it goes wrong
• Manage through leads and senior individual contributors (ICs), developing both—regular 1:1s, clear performance feedback, growth planning, and sponsorship of meaningful work
• Partner and support the 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 organization's work and technical direction to senior leadership and enterprise customers and partners where appropriate
• Contribute to org-wide engineering process improvements—how we plan, ship, and 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 business delivery velocity on a large scale
• Have a track record of building high-performing teams in fast-moving, technically demanding environments
• 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. 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 modeling, or network supply chain
• Experience with infrastructure capacity forecasting and long-lead hardware planning
• Prior experience at a high-growth infrastructure or cloud company