Senior Optical Engineering Manager
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 6, 2026. First seen by Alion on Nov 6, 2026. Lambda scores A on the Alion truth index.
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.
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.
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.