Senior Director, Business Operations & NPI

The era of pervasive AI has arrived.  SambaNova builds the chips, systems, and cloud services that make high-performance AI inference practical at scale.  Our fifth-generation Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU), the SN50, is purpose-built for agentic AI and fast token generation, and our SambaRack systems are designed to run in the air-cooled data centers customers already have.  We work with NeoClouds, AI labs, sovereign AI providers, service providers, and enterprises that want faster tokens at a lower total cost of ownership.

SambaNova is growing quickly, and we are expanding our partner and ecosystem work to keep pace.  We are looking for people who want to help shape what comes next.

About the Role

SambaNova is looking for a Senior Director of Business Operations and New Product Introduction (NPI) to help bring SambaNova's silicon and systems to market through a growing ecosystem of partners.  You will work directly with the Chief Corporate Development Officer, and you will have a visible, company-level impact from your first week.

We are at the forefront of heterogeneous disaggregated inference (HDI), where GPUs and SambaNova RDUs each do what they do best.  Interest from OEMs, ODMs, NeoClouds, hyperscalers, and sovereign customers is growing quickly, and we want every partner to have a clear, consistent experience working with us.  Many of our engagements today are tailored to the partner.  You will help turn what we learn from them into a repeatable playbook: a clear path from first conversation to signed agreement, from prototype to volume shipment, and from first order to lifecycle support.  That playbook will make SambaNova easier to work with and become a differentiating moat for the company.

This is a rare opportunity to shape how SambaNova works with its partners at a pivotal moment.  You will begin by listening to colleagues across the company to understand what is working, where the gaps are, and what each team needs to succeed.  From there, you will collaborate with those teams to fill the gaps, connect the pieces, and amplify the work already underway, and you will help create new opportunities across a range of partner and business models.  Your technical depth will let you translate what customers and partners need into clear priorities for SambaNova, and your judgment will help the company act on them with confidence.

Responsibilities

Build the NPI framework and playbook

• Define and drive SambaNova's end-to-end NPI flow for partner and OEM engagements, covering partner engagement and agreements, architecture and reference design, development and validation (EVT/DVT/PVT), manufacturing readiness, customer proof of concept, workload validation, acceptance, mass production, and lifecycle support
• Set gate criteria, owners, templates, and checklists for each phase, and make them simple enough that teams actually use them
• Convert one-off deals into repeatable playbooks by business model and partner type, and keep improving them as we learn
• Define the metrics, dashboards, and executive reporting that show where every engagement stands

Lead technical project execution across engagements

• Run the plan, milestones, dependencies, risks, and action items for a growing number of concurrent OEM and partner engagements
• Work across silicon, hardware, rack and thermal, firmware, software, supply chain, QA, sales, support, marketing, finance, and legal to get the right people and decisions in place at the right time
• Help the team interpret customer and partner requirements, including architecture, BOM, power and cooling, form factor, test, and qualification, and translate them into clear SambaNova actions and trade-off decisions
• Understand and track architecture decisions alongside engineering leaders, and highlight early when a decision is blocking progress

Help drive the commercial lifecycle

• Partner with the CCDO, CFO, and Legal to shape customer and partner agreements, including deliverables, roles and responsibilities, milestones, audit functions, and support obligations
• Track every engagement from NDA, MOU, LOI, and MSA through orders, forecasting, pricing, delivery, QA support, returns, and revenue recognition
• Bring structure to supply and commercial terms such as NCNR commitments, MOQs, forecast commitments, lead times, and allocation

Develop the ecosystem and the go-to-market

• Work with sales, product, and marketing on sales enablement, reference architectures, co-sell motions, training, and joint launches with partners
• Define software, firmware, and technical support models for partners and their customers
• Help establish QA, RMA, failure analysis, and returns processes that match what partners expect from a silicon supplier