Principal Network Engineer

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