Director of Engineering - Inference Platform
SambaNova Systems
$245,000 - $325,000 / year
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Description
SambaNova is a leader in next-generation AI infrastructure, delivering a full-stack inference platform for customers worldwide. At the core of SambaNova's technology is the RDU (Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit) — a chip built on a dataflow architecture rather than the traditional GPU model. Its decode performance is especially strong for agentic workloads like multi-turn agents, code generation, and long-running applications. RDUs are packaged into SambaRack, rack-scale hardware that lets customers deploy state-of-the-art models with better performance, greater energy efficiency, and faster time to value.
About the team
The SambaStack team builds the inference serving platform enterprises and service providers use to host foundation models on RDU hardware. The platform is cloud-agnostic, and the team owns deployment, orchestration, scaling, and reliability for production inference workloads.
About the Role
The SambaStack team is seeking an Engineering Director to lead a software engineering team while remaining a hands-on technical contributor. You'll own the growth and effectiveness of your team, the technical quality of their output, and the roadmap for the inference serving platform. You'll continue to design systems and write code on the platform's hardest problems.
Responsibilities
People & Team Leadership
- Lead, grow, and inspire a software team, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement
- Own hiring for your team: define roles, assess candidates, and build a diverse, high-performing engineering organization
- Drive the career development of your engineers through regular 1:1s, meaningful feedback, and clear growth plans
- Set clear goals and expectations, track team progress, and remove blockers to keep the team executing effectively
- Partner with Product, ML, QA, and DevOps leadership to align team priorities with broader organizational objectives
Technical Contribution
- Contribute directly as a software engineer: designing systems, writing code, and leading implementation on critical platform initiatives
- Participate in and lead design reviews, providing authoritative technical guidance on major features and cross-cutting changes
- Establish and uphold engineering standards, best practices, and coding quality across the team
- Proactively identify and drive the resolution of systemic risks: performance bottlenecks, reliability gaps, and scaling constraints
- Stay current on emerging technologies and AI inference trends to inform the team's technical direction
Required Qualifications
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading and managing engineering teams
- Demonstrated ability to manage, develop, and hire strong engineers while remaining a hands-on technical contributor
- Strong technical depth in backend systems built with Python, Go, or Rust
- Experience with AI inference serving, orchestration, and the infrastructure challenges of LLM workloads at production scale
- Proven ability to drive engineering excellence across an engineering team
- Excellent communication skills: able to work effectively with engineers, cross-functional partners, and senior leadership
- Experience running iterative engineering processes in a fast-paced environment
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with Kubernetes ecosystem tooling, including Operators and Helm Charts
- Background in ML application optimization and productionization
- Experience building or managing teams that deliver cloud-native platforms for enterprise customers
- Familiarity with AI coding assistants and the developer tooling ecosystem
- Experience at a high-growth AI infrastructure company
Base Salary Range:
Submission Guidelines
Please note that in order to be considered an applicant for any position at SambaNova Systems, you must submit an application form for each position for which you believe you are qualified.
EEO Policy
SambaNova Systems is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard basis of age (40 and over), color, disability, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, military or veteran status, national origin/ancestry, race, religion, creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding), sexual orientation, and any other applicable status protected by federal, state, or local laws.
Benefits Summary for US-Based, Full-Time Employment Positions
SambaNova offers a competitive total rewards package, including the base salary, plus equity and benefits. We cover 95% premium coverage for employee medical insurance, and 77% premium coverage for dependents and offer a Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contribution. We also offer Dental, Vision, Short/Long term Disability, Basic Life, Voluntary Life, and AD&D insurance plans in addition to Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options like Health Care, Limited Purpose, and Dependent Care. Our library of well-being benefits available to you and your dependents includes a full subscription to Headspace, Gympass+ membership with access to physical gyms, One Medical membership, counseling services with an Employee Assistance Program, and much more.
Benefits
- health insurance
- stock options
About this role
Leading SambaNova's inference serving platform requires someone who can operate at two levels simultaneously: building and scaling a high-performing engineering team while staying deeply involved in solving the platform's most complex technical challenges. The role sits at the intersection of people leadership and hands-on system design, where you'll own team growth, hiring, and career development while also architecting solutions for production AI inference at enterprise scale. You'll partner across Product, ML, QA, and DevOps to align priorities and drive the technical direction of a cloud-agnostic platform that powers foundation model deployment on SambaNova's RDU hardware.
This position suits someone with 12+ years of software engineering experience and at least two years managing teams, with strong backend expertise in Python, Go, or Rust and proven depth in AI inference infrastructure, orchestration, and LLM workloads in production. You should be comfortable establishing engineering standards, leading design reviews, and identifying systemic risks—performance bottlenecks, reliability gaps, scaling constraints—while remaining credible as a technical contributor. Experience with Kubernetes tooling, cloud-native platforms for enterprise customers, and ML productionization is preferred.
The role is based in San Jose and requires in-office work. SambaNova offers a competitive package with base salary from $245,000 to $325,000, equity, comprehensive medical and dental coverage, HSA and FSA options, and well-being benefits including Headspace, Gympass+, and One Medical.
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Pay for this role
$245,000 to $325,000 per year
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