AI Performance Engineer - New Grad

SambaNova Systems • San Jose, TX

4d

About The Position

SambaNova is a leader in next-generation AI infrastructure, delivering a full-stack inference platform for customers worldwide. Its RDU (Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit) is built on a dataflow architecture and is designed for strong decode performance in agentic workloads. RDUs are packaged into SambaRack, rack-scale hardware that enables customers to deploy state-of-the-art models with improved performance, energy efficiency, and time to value.

The AI Performance team brings up and optimizes foundation models such as DeepSeek, Llama, Qwen, and GPT OSS on SambaNova's dataflow platform. The team profiles and tunes models across the compiler, runtime, and hardware layers to improve inference throughput and latency.

As a new graduate AI Performance Engineer, you will bring up open-source models on the SambaNova stack, profile execution, identify bottlenecks, and apply performance optimizations. You will collaborate with compiler, runtime, hardware, and machine learning teams to improve and ship performance in SambaNova products.

Requirements

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong programming skills in Python or C++.
• Understanding of algorithms, data structures, and numerical computing.
• Experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
• Experience with inference frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT, or SGLang.
• GPU programming experience with CUDA or Triton.

Nice To Haves

• Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience with LLM training or inference.
• Familiarity with quantization, graph optimization, kernel fusion, or model partitioning.
• Knowledge of memory hierarchy, caching, and scheduling for large model execution.
• Internship or research experience in ML systems or performance optimization.
• Publications or open-source contributions in ML systems.

Responsibilities

• Bring up new foundation models on the SambaNova platform using its software stack.
• Profile model performance across compiler, runtime, and hardware layers.
• Identify bottlenecks and propose dataflow or scheduling optimizations for single-node and distributed systems.
• Apply techniques from recent research in quantization, scheduling, and memory optimization.
• Benchmark throughput and latency and track performance changes across releases.
• Work with the machine learning, compiler, runtime, and hardware teams to ship performance improvements into SambaNova products.

Benefits

• Equity.
• 95% premium coverage for employee medical insurance.
• 77% premium coverage for dependent medical insurance.
• Health Savings Account with employer contribution.
• Dental insurance.
• Vision insurance.
• Short- and long-term disability insurance.
• Basic and voluntary life insurance.
• AD&D insurance.
• Flexible Spending Account options for health care, limited purpose, and dependent care.
• Headspace subscription.
• Gympass+ membership with access to physical gyms.
• One Medical membership.
• Counseling services through an Employee Assistance Program.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level