Staff External Product Manager at Lambda

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 Jose or San Francisco office location 4 days per week; Lambda’s designated work from home day is currently Tuesday. The Role The External Product Manager is the ultimate steward of the customer’s success. Working hand-in-hand with Sales, Solutions Engineering, and Customer Success, you will be the product and technical voice embedded in our most important accounts. You will operate with a founder’s mindset: deeply invested in account outcomes, proactive in solving problems, and relentless about making customers successful on Lambda’s platform. This is a high-visibility, outbound role where your ability to build genuine trust, navigate complex technical environments, and drive product-led account growth will define your impact. You will own the product and technical dimensions of customer engagement across pre-sales and post-sales for Super Intelligence (SI) and Enterprise customers, partnering closely with Sales who own the commercial relationship. You will wear multiple hats: Product Management, Program Management, Technical Account Management, and strategic communications. When done right, this collaboration leads to renewals, upsells, co-build partnerships, and case study opportunities that fuel Lambda’s growth. What You Will Do - Own pre-sales and post-sales customer engagement for SI partners, SI-led customers, or enterprise accounts, acting as the primary technical and commercial interface. - Serve as the internal champion and steward of customer success, representing customer needs, constraints, and priorities across technical, operational, and commercial dimensions. - Drive cross-functional coordination with customer support, operations, engineering, and product teams to trace, escalate, and resolve customer issues with speed and clarity. - Manage complex, multi-party deployments involving alignment across Lambda's platform, SI delivery teams, and end customers. - Own all external-facing communication for your accounts, ensuring consistent messaging and internal alignment before anything reaches the customer. - Establish and maintain customer engagement cadences: weekly technical reviews, monthly business alignment calls, quarterly roadmap exercises, and QBRs. - Own the customer roadmap and feature delivery pipeline, running technical and product discovery to ensure features ship to the right customers at the right time. - Translate customer feedback, pain points, and requests into structured input for Inbound PMs to directly inform product prioritization and roadmap decisions. - Manage cluster performance accountability, including effective uptime, SLA tracking, spares policy, diagnostics, and maintenance strategy. - Navigate complex account dynamics: budget cycles, internal politics, SLA interpretation disputes, and organizational ambiguity on both sides of the table. Who You Are You are a customer-facing product leader with technical depth and interpersonal magnetism. You walk into a room and people trust you. You can talk to a GPU infrastructure engineer about NVLink topologies in the morning and negotiate a multi-year contract expansion with a VP of Finance in the afternoon. You are not a "yes-person"; you push back with data and judgment, and customers respect you more for it. Requirements - 5+ years of experience in Product Management, Technical Account Management, Solutions Engineering, or a related customer-facing technical role. - Deep technical fluency in GPU infrastructure, cloud computing, distributed systems, or AI/ML workloads. You should be comfortable discussing CUDA, InfiniBand, Kubernetes scheduling, and training cluster architectures. - Proven ability to manage complex enterprise accounts with multiple stakeholders, competing priorities, and high commercial stakes. - Strong communication and storytelling skills: you can distill technical complexity into clear, compelling narratives for both engineers and executives. - Experience running structured engagement cadences (QBRs, roadmap reviews, SLA discussions) and producing executive-level briefings. - Demonstrated skill in negotiation, pushback, and constructive conflict resolution with customers and internal teams. - Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to build process where none exists. You have thrived in fast-moving, high-growth environments. - Strong cross-functional coordination instincts, with experience driving outcomes across engineering, support, sales, and operations. Nice to Have - Experience at a cloud infrastructure provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, CoreWeave, or similar). - Familiarity with Slurm, Kubernetes, or managed orchestration platforms for GPU workloads. - Experience managing SLA and uptime reporting for large-scale infrastructure deployments. - Previous work with System Integrators or channel partners in a technical capacity. What Success Looks Like - Your customers renew, expand, and actively choose Lambda over alternatives because of the trust you have built. - Internal teams know exactly what your accounts need and why, because your feedback loops are tight and structured. - You have transformed chaotic, ad hoc customer engagements into repeatable, high-quality motions that scale. - You have co-built features, published case studies, and created marketing opportunities directly from your account relationships. - Lambda's executive team trusts your account briefings as the single source of truth. What Failure Looks Like (Anti-Patterns) - Being a "yes-person" to whatever the customer says they want, without digging into the underlying need. - Failing to negotiate or push back when the situation demands it. - Misreading the customer organization's internal politics or budget dynamics. - Overselling what Lambda can deliver, creating trust debt that compounds over time. - De-prioritizing the customer's best interests in favor of short-term internal convenience. - Showing up to customer meetings unprepared, adding chaos to an already complex relationship. 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: [Upgrade to PRO to see link] - 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 A Final Note: You do not need to match all of the listed expectations to apply for this position. We are committed to building a team with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and skills. 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.