Senior or Staff Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Hybrid; presence required 4 days per week at the San Francisco, San Jose, or Bellevue office. Work from home day is Tuesday.

Annual salary: $255,000–$346,000 in San Francisco/San Jose; $230,000–$311,000 in Bellevue.

Company

Lambda builds AI cloud infrastructure for AI researchers, enterprises, and hyperscalers, with a focus on GPU-powered computing.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate services, APIs, control planes, and platform capabilities for the AI cloud.
• Solve distributed-systems challenges involving state, consistency, concurrency, scheduling, failure recovery, and lifecycle management.
• Own the full engineering lifecycle, including architecture, implementation, testing, rollout, observability, on-call, and continuous improvement.
• Improve availability, latency, throughput, efficiency, security, and operability at large scale.
• Turn incidents and near misses into automation, testing, guardrails, and other durable engineering improvements.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, networking, storage, security, and SRE teams; contribute to reviews, standards, mentorship, and cross-team architecture at Staff level.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience or equivalent evidence of impact building production systems.
• Strong proficiency in at least one general-purpose programming language; Go and Python are used primarily.
• Experience designing, building, and operating backend services, distributed systems, infrastructure, or platform capabilities at meaningful scale.
• Practical understanding of system design, data models, APIs, failure modes, performance, and production reliability tradeoffs.
• Experience owning complex work through delivery and operation, including testing, staged rollout, monitoring, incident response, and root-cause improvement.
• Ability to align cross-functional partners and build consensus around technical decisions and tradeoffs.

Nice to have

• Experience with AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, container orchestration, schedulers, controllers, or cloud control-plane systems.
• Experience in cloud infrastructure domains such as compute, storage, networking, identity and access, developer platforms, billing, databases, or fleet management.
• Experience with infrastructure automation, durable workflows, event-driven architectures, or infrastructure as code.
• Experience designing highly available, multi-region, or rapidly scaling distributed systems.
• Familiarity with GPU infrastructure, HPC environments, or large-scale AI/ML training and inference workloads.

Culture & Benefits

• Cash and equity compensation.
• Health, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
• Wellness and commuter stipends for select roles.
• 401(k) plan with a 2% company match for USA employees.
• Flexible paid time off.