Senior Software Engineer - Core Cloud Platform

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 San Francisco/San Jose or Bellevue, WA. office location 4 days per week; Lambda’s designated work from home day is currently Tuesday.

About the Role

As a Senior Software Engineer on Lambda’s Core Cloud Platform team, you will build the control-plane systems that power Lambda’s GPU cloud. The team owns core platform capabilities across compute lifecycle, bare metal orchestration, deployment readiness, reliability, and operational tooling.

You will architect systems that turn bare-metal GPU infrastructure into reliable, customer-facing cloud capacity. This means building orchestration layers, distributed schedulers, and automated control loops to manage instance lifecycles, host reclaims, and safe worldwide deployments.

This role is a strong fit for engineers who enjoy distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, operational excellence, and working close to the hardware/software boundary.

What You’ll Do

• Architect and scale foundational cloud platform services that govern compute lifecycles, bare-metal hosts, capacity planning, and intelligent placement workflows for a high-performance GPU cloud.
• Raise the bar on operational readiness by treating observability, and alerting as software engineering problems.
• Eliminate toil by engineering automated, self-healing control loops for bare-metal lifecycle events (launch, reboot, host reclaim, validation, and quarantine).
• Design and maintain highly resilient APIs, backend services, and distributed state machines, ensuring fault tolerance and high availability for business-critical control planes.
• Lead incident response and resolution for complex production issues across distributed services, infrastructure dependencies, and networking, driving blameless post incident analysis to ensure systemic improvements.
• Partner cross-functionally with networking, storage, security, fleet, and product teams to define clear cross-system contracts and deliver seamless end-to-end cloud capabilities.
• Drive engineering excellence by contributing to system architecture, authoring detailed design docs, conducting rigorous code reviews, and mentoring engineers across the team.

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Have 6+ years of professional software engineering experience building highly available distributed systems in Python, Go, or a similar language.
• Have designed and operated complex systems like distributed state machines, orchestrators, workflow engines, or high-throughput APIs on modern infrastructure (Linux, Kubernetes).
• Possess a deep understanding of reliability fundamentals, including fault tolerance, state machines, idempotency, and graceful degradation.
• Bring an engineering approach to operations, treating on-call as an opportunity to relentlessly automate away manual toil.
• Thrive in ambiguity, acting as a technical leader who can turn complex infrastructure challenges into elegant, resilient production outcomes.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience building cloud control planes, event-driven architecture, or durable workflows (Temporal, Airflow).
• Track record of implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC), deep observability (Prometheus, distributed tracing), and automated incident remediation.
• Hands-on knowledge of VPCs, SDN, InfiniBand, routing, or fundamental security concepts like tenant isolation and identity management.
• Experience with bare metal provisioning, GPU clusters, large-scale AI/ML infrastructure, or host lifecycle management (BMC/Redfish).

You Will Be Successful in This Role If You

• Enjoy breaking down ambiguous platform problems into concrete APIs, workflows, contracts, and implementation plans.
• Collaborate seamlessly across product, infrastructure, fleet, networking, security, and support boundaries.
• Care deeply about production behavior, not just shipping a feature.
• Are genuinely excited to help build the foundational cloud platform layer that powers large-scale AI infrastructure.

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.