Network Planning & Design Manager

San Francisco Office (Fremont St) · Bellevue · Full-time · Hybrid · Posted Oct 9, 2026

At a glance

- 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

Design the connectivity behind Lambda's next data center, backbone route and customer interconnect, working directly with carrier engineers and equipment partners.
This is a technical individual contributor role on the Network Planning and Delivery team within Cloud and AI Networking.

Develop physical and optical connectivity designs for data centers, points of presence, backbone routes and customer interconnects.
Translate customer and network requirements into routes, capacity plans, equipment needs and acceptance criteria, working within Network Engineering's and HPC architecture.
Compare dark fiber, wavelength, internet transit and interconnection options on latency, resilience, total cost, delivery time and room for expansion.
Validate route diversity and identify shared conduits, building entrances, fiber extensions and other dependencies that could compromise a design.
Work with carrier engineering teams to develop routes, extend reach and resolve coverage, site access or capacity constraints.
Evaluate new and existing suppliers, gather technical proposals and budgetary quotes, and recommend options with clear tradeoffs.
Work with optical and network equipment partners on alternatives when fiber availability, equipment lead times or cost put a build at risk.
Give Supply Chain a defined technical scope for negotiations and contracting, including supplier assumptions and unresolved risks.
Produce a complete design package for Network Engineering approval, then work with Delivery on the build schedule, dependencies and acceptance requirements.
Resolve design questions during delivery and take revisions back through Network Engineering review when site or supplier conditions change.

Experience designing or developing carrier, cloud or data center connectivity, with designs that have progressed from requirements into delivery.
Practical knowledge of dark fiber, wavelength services, optical transport and internet interconnection.
Ability to assess physical route diversity, equipment dependencies and capacity needs beyond what a route map alone shows.
Experience working directly with carrier engineers, colocation providers or equipment suppliers to solve design constraints.
Ability to compare supplier options on technical fit, delivery risk and total cost, and explain your recommendation.
Clear design documentation that engineering reviewers and delivery teams can use.

Experience designing long-haul optical networks or dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) systems.
Experience with private cloud connectivity, internet exchanges or large compute deployments.
Carrier solutions engineering experience, or familiarity with route mapping and capacity planning tools.