Senior Software Engineer - SDN

San Francisco Office (Fremont St) · 5+ years experience · Full-time · Hybrid · Posted Oct 7, 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

We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer to help design and build the next generation of our network platform.
In this role, you will develop the systems, services, and automation that power our software-defined network across data centers and cloud environments.

Design and build software to scale Lambda’s high performance multi-tenant cloud network
Develop reproducible automation and tooling for network configuration and deployments
Implement and operate Software Defined Networking services and related control-plane software
Engineer highly available network services through observability, failover, and redundancy features
Deliver predictable networking performance for clients via software-driven network engineering solutions
Develop, integrate, and maintain network monitoring and management tools and services
Participate in on-call and contribute to incident response tooling and automation

5+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally in systems, infrastructure, or networking-focused domains.
Demonstrated experience designing and implementing production-scale Software Defined Networking (SDN) systems, ideally with AWS VPC–like functionality.
Hands-on experience building and maintaining SDN platforms using technologies such as OpenStack Neutron, OVN, or similar network virtualization frameworks.
Deep understanding of the Linux networking stack, including namespaces, routing, iptables/nftables, network virtualization, SR-IOV, and DPDK.
Proficiency with the Linux command line and strong understanding of networking concepts from a software engineering viewpoint.
Experience working with multi–data center and hybrid cloud networking environments, with an emphasis on automation and software-driven control planes.
5+ years of software development experience in C, Go, or Python for building network services, tooling, and automation.
Experience working with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and deployment systems; strong familiarity with Git, and experience operating in GitOps-driven environments.
Prior involvement in on-call rotations, incident response, and building tools to improve network or system reliability.
Experience deploying, operating, and automating applications on Kubernetes, including building supporting services or tooling for networking and lifecycle management.

Experience automating network configuration within public clouds using tools like Kubernetes, HELM, Terraform, and Ansible
Understanding of the SDN ecosystem (e.g. OVS, Neutron, VMware NSX, Cisco ACI or Nexus Fabric Controller, Arista CVP) and how to integrate with it programmatically
Have experience working with and building automation around Spine and Leaf (Clos) network topology
Have experience and understanding of BGP EVPN VXLAN networks and have automated their configuration or monitoring
Experience with building and maintaining multi-data center networks, SD-WAN, DWDM, and related automation
Experience integrating and automating policy and configuration for Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW)

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