AI Systems Performance Engineer - New Graduate

SambaNova Systems • San Jose, CA

15h • Onsite

About The Position

The era of pervasive AI has arrived. In this era, organizations will use generative AI to unlock hidden value in their data, accelerate processes, reduce costs, drive efficiency and innovation to fundamentally transform their businesses and operations at scale. About The Role We are seeking a talented and highly motivated AI Systems Performance Engineer to bring up and optimize state-of-the-art foundation models on SambaNova's reconfigurable dataflow platform. You'll work hands-on with advanced AI models — such as DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, GPT OSS, Llama, Qwen, and other frontier architectures — and learn how modern AI systems achieve high throughput, low latency, and efficient large-scale inference. In this role, you'll work at the intersection of machine learning and computer systems, collaborating with engineers across model, compiler, runtime, and hardware teams. This is an ideal opportunity for a new graduate who is passionate about understanding how AI models execute on real hardware and wants to help build the next generation of high-performance AI systems.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, computer engineering, or a related technical field (e.g., applied mathematics, physics, or statistics), completed or expected before the start date.
• Strong programming skills in Python, C++, or a similar programming language.
• Solid foundations in algorithms, data structures, computer architecture, operating systems, or parallel computing.
• Familiarity with deep learning and at least one major ML framework, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with an interest in understanding and optimizing system performance.
• Ability and enthusiasm to learn across machine learning, software systems, and hardware.

Nice To Haves

• Coursework, research, internship, or project experience in machine learning systems, computer architecture, compilers, distributed systems, or high-performance computing.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, multimodal models, or transformer architectures.
• Familiarity with model inference, KV cache, batching, quantization, or distributed execution.
• Experience with GPU or accelerator programming using CUDA, Triton, OpenCL, or similar technologies.
• Familiarity with frameworks such as vLLM, DeepSpeed, Megatron, or TensorRT.
• Understanding of memory hierarchy, caching, parallelism, or scheduling.
• Experience profiling and optimizing the performance of software or ML workloads.
• Research publications, open-source contributions, programming competitions, or technically challenging personal projects are a plus.
• We value strong technical fundamentals, curiosity, and the ability to learn quickly.
• Prior production experience with large-scale AI systems is not required.

Responsibilities

• Bring up cutting-edge foundation models, including LLMs and multimodal models, on the SambaNova platform through the SambaNova software stack.
• Analyze and profile model execution to identify performance bottlenecks across model, compiler, runtime, and hardware layers.
• Optimize AI workloads for throughput, latency, memory efficiency, and scalability.
• Collaborate with machine learning, compiler, runtime, and hardware engineers to develop high-performance AI applications.
• Explore and integrate new techniques in model architecture, quantization, scheduling, caching, and memory optimization.
• Develop tools, benchmarks, and performance analysis methodologies for large-scale AI inference.
• Investigate new model architectures and translate research advances into efficient implementations on production AI systems.
• Contribute ideas for dataflow, scheduling, and system optimizations for both single-node and distributed inference.

Benefits

• Competitive total rewards package, including base salary, equity, and benefits.
• 95% premium coverage for employee medical insurance.
• 77% premium coverage for dependents for medical insurance.
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contribution.
• Dental insurance.
• Vision insurance.
• Short-term Disability insurance.
• Long-term Disability insurance.
• Basic Life insurance.
• Voluntary Life insurance.
• Accidental Death & Dismemberment (AD&D) insurance.
• Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options (Health Care, Limited Purpose, and Dependent Care).
• Library of well-being benefits.
• Full subscription to Headspace.
• Gympass+ membership with access to physical gyms.
• One Medical membership.
• Counseling services with an Employee Assistance Program.

What This Job Offers

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