Staff Software Engineer - Managed Kubernetes

The posting, as Lambda wrote it

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 office location 4 days per week; Lambda’s designated work from home day is currently Tuesday.

About the Role

Lambda is building the AI Cloud of the future. We are seeking a Staff Engineer to help our development of our Managed Kubernetes platform. Think GKE, but purpose-built for AI workloads and running on bare metal. This is a foundational technical leadership role where you will shape the infrastructure that powers the next generation of AI training and inference at scale.

As a Staff Engineer on our Orchestration team, you will collaborate to help drive the technical vision for Lambda's managed orchestration services, including Managed Kubernetes, Managed Slurm on Kubernetes, and higher-level platform services for inference and AIOps. You'll work at the intersection of distributed systems, GPU-accelerated computing, and Cloud Native infrastructure to build systems that are reliable, performant, and elegantly simple for our customers.

This is not a role for someone who just operates Kubernetes; it is a technical leadership role for an engineer who has synthesized the core domains of infrastructure (compute, network, storage, security) and can design holistic solutions across all of them. You'll be working closely with NVIDIA's open-source ecosystem, and partnering with internal teams across the stack to deliver a world-class managed platform.

What You'll Do

Product Engineering

• Drive technical vision for Lambda's Managed Kubernetes bare-metal platform, including control plane scalability, multi-tenancy, cluster lifecycle management, and high availability
• Integrate and extend NVIDIA's open-source ecosystem: GPU Operator, Network Operator, DCGM, NCCL, and emerging projects like AICR and Topograph for topology-aware scheduling and placement
• Design GPU-aware orchestration systems
• Lead development of services that power our managed services
• Inform on and help with networking solutions for AI workloads: CNI integration (Cilium, Multus), high-performance fabrics (InfiniBand, RoCE), RDMA, and GPUDirect. You will work closely with our Network team to define and drive requirements
• Inform and help with storage architecture requirements for AI workloads. You will partner with Storage teams on what managed K8s, Slurm, and future services need
• Build the foundation for Managed Slurm on Kubernetes, enabling traditional HPC workloads to run seamlessly alongside Kubernetes workload
• Design higher-level platform services for inference, including model serv

[…]
PU and networking stack, working with cutting-edge open-source tooling

• Real technical challenges: Massive scale GPU clusters and the unique demands of AI workloads
• Cross-stack influence: Shape not just Kubernetes, but the network, storage, and compute infrastructure that supports it
• Direct impact: Your work enables AI breakthroughs. Every model trained on Lambda benefits from systems you build
• World-class team: Work alongside engineers with deep expertise in ML, systems, and 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.