Principal Cloud Backend Engineer

SambaNova Systems, Inc.•Palo Alto, CA

31d

About The Position

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Principal or Senior Principal Cloud Backend Engineer to architect and build the core platform that powers our large-scale AI inference services, with a critical focus on enabling flexible billing and monetization strategies. You will own the design and implementation of the systems that not only ensure reliability and scalability but also directly unlock new revenue streams and business models for our AI services. This is a high-impact role where you will solve complex challenges at the intersection of cloud-native AI infrastructure, metering, and monetization. You will build the foundational systems for usage-based pricing, subscription plans, and dynamic entitlements that serve as the economic engine for our business. If you are passionate about building platforms that are both technically robust and commercially critical, we want to hear from you.

Requirements

10 + years of experience in software engineering, with a significant focus on designing and building large-scale, distributed backend systems in cloud environments.
5 + years in a Principal or Lead Engineer role, with a proven track record of architecting, delivering, and operating business-critical platforms.
Expert proficiency in one or more of the following: Go, Rust and C++. Deep understanding of concurrency, performance optimization, and systems programming.
Deep, hands-on experience with cloud-native technologies (Kubernetes, Docker, etc.) and major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure).
Extensive experience with both SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, Redis) and designing data models for high-throughput, low-latency applications.
Strong foundation in API design (REST, gRPC), event-driven architecture, and building resilient microservices.
Excellent communication and leadership skills, with the ability to drive technical consensus and articulate complex concepts to a diverse audience.

Nice To Haves

Direct Monetization/Billing Experience: Proven experience building or significantly extending platforms for usage-based metering, subscription management, entitlements, or billing systems. Experience with billing providers (e.g., Stripe,Metronome) is a strong plus.
Experience in AI/ML Infrastructure: Direct experience building or operating platforms for serving, scaling, and managing AI models (e.g., inference servers, model deployment pipelines).

Responsibilities

Platform Architecture & Strategy: Lead the technical vision and architecture for our inference serving and monetization platform. Design systems that are fault-tolerant, highly available, and can scale to meet growing demand while accurately tracking usage for billing.
Monetization Platform Design: Architect the core systems for flexible monetization, including:
Entitlements & Quota Management: Designing a flexible system to define and enforce complex usage plans, rate limits, and access policies.
Usage Metering & Aggregation: Building a highly reliable and accurate system to meter usage (e.g., tokens, requests) at scale and prepare data for billing.
Billing Integration: Designing clean abstractions and APIs to seamlessly integrate with external billing and payment providers (e.g., Stripe, Metronome).
Distributed Systems Design: Architect and implement complex distributed systems involving real-time rate limiting, quota enforcement, and fair-share scheduling for a multi-tenant environment.
Performance & Cost Optimization: Identify and eliminate bottlenecks in the end-to-end system, ensuring low-latency request handling while maintaining precise financial accuracy.
Technical Leadership: Serve as a technical leader and mentor. Establish best practices in code quality, testing, and observability for business-critical financial data pipelines.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with Product Management, Finance, and GTM teams to translate business requirements for new pricing models (e.g., subscriptions, pay-as-you-go, custom enterprise plans) into scalable technical solutions.

Benefits

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.

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