Principal Product Manager

SambaNova Systems•San Jose, CA

6d•$190,000 - $230,000

About The Position

SambaNova is hiring a technical product manager to own its model and capability roadmap end to end. The role serves as product owner and subject-matter expert for models, translating understanding of model architectures, benchmarks, adoption, customer demand, and shipping requirements into roadmap decisions, commitments, and launches. It is a deeply technical product role that includes hands-on model testing and building quick prototypes to demonstrate the advantages of fast inference. The product manager owns a unified model prioritization system and a per-chip roadmap, turns priorities into dated engineering commitments, and coordinates model launches with Marketing, Documentation, and GTM. The role also defines what constitutes a fully featured model, identifies capability and conformance gaps, and works with Engineering, QA, and Solutions to establish launch criteria and close gaps. The role involves evaluating new models with real prompts, agentic tasks, and feature checks; identifying use cases where SambaNova's speed and efficiency provide a competitive advantage; and creating demos or mock-ups for leadership, GTM, and customers. The product manager also tracks the open-weight model landscape, gathers and responds to customer and field feedback, assesses competitive positioning, and improves the roadmap process and its supporting data pipeline. Success is measured by taking ownership of the stack rank, per-chip roadmap, and feature framework in the first 90 days; reducing time-to-model and improving capability-gap and customer-request visibility within six months; and establishing the roadmap as a strategic advantage with predictable launches and fully featured models within 12 months.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
At least 7 years of combined experience in product management and technical roles such as ML engineering, solutions engineering, or research, including at least 3 years as a PM on AI/ML, developer, or infrastructure products.
Strong working knowledge of LLMs, including transformer and MoE architectures, inference trade-offs such as latency, throughput, context, and quantization, and features such as function calling, structured output, and reasoning.
Track record of owning a roadmap and shipping products, including setting priorities under constraints, making data-supported trade-offs, and driving cross-functional teams to launch.
Comfort with data, including building and maintaining prioritization models, dashboards, and scorecards, and sufficient hands-on ability to query an API or modify a Python script.
Hands-on experience calling model APIs, running evaluations and quick experiments, and building simple prototypes or mock-ups with Python, notebooks, or lightweight UI tools, including AI coding assistants.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to present a roadmap and defend trade-offs to executives, engineers, and customers.

Nice To Haves

Product experience at an inference provider, model lab, AI cloud, or AI hardware company.
Hands-on familiarity with inference stacks such as vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM and OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible APIs.
Experience designing evaluations and benchmark methodology for model quality and feature conformance.
Background as an ML or solutions engineer before moving into product.
Experience with enterprise, sovereign AI, or public-sector customers.
Active presence in the open-source model community.

Responsibilities

Own the unified, weighted stack rank of candidate models using customer demand, capability, market adoption, recency, strategic value, and engineering effort; tune the rubric, document overrides, and run regular prioritization reviews.
Own the roadmap of models by hardware generation, configuration, and performance targets, grounding it in measured platform data.
Turn model priorities into dated engineering commitments, track delivery, and run launches with Marketing, Documentation, and GTM.
Maintain the model roadmap and dashboard as the source of truth for executives, account teams, and customers, and present the roadmap internally and externally.
Define the feature-completeness framework for models across speed, efficiency, model infrastructure, cloud, and API capabilities.
Identify capability and conformance gaps through testing and telemetry, prioritize them, and drive them to closure with Engineering.
Work with QA and Solutions to establish acceptance criteria and evaluations that models must pass before launch.
Test new models using real prompts, agentic tasks, and feature checks to identify strengths, weaknesses, and gaps.
Identify models, capabilities, and use cases where SambaNova's speed and efficiency provide a competitive advantage, supporting conclusions with evidence.
Build quick demos, prototypes, and product mock-ups to demonstrate model value to leadership, GTM, and customers; hand promising ideas to Solutions Engineering for productionization.
Use hands-on findings to inform model prioritization, feature requirements, and launch messaging.
Track open-weight model releases, architectures, benchmark results, and usage signals, and assess their significance.
Triage customer, field, and Model Feedback requests, close the loop with requesters, and represent demand accurately in the model rank.
Assess how SambaNova's models, speed, and features compare with GPU clouds and other inference providers, and apply this understanding to roadmap and messaging.
Improve the roadmap process and its data pipeline, including Jira, internal platform APIs, and public signals, to make it trustworthy, auditable, and as automated as possible.

Benefits

Equity and benefits as part of a competitive total rewards package.
95% premium coverage for employee medical insurance and 77% premium coverage for dependent medical insurance.
Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contribution.
Dental insurance.
Vision insurance.
Short- and long-term disability insurance.
Basic life, voluntary life, and AD&D insurance plans.
Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options, including Health Care, Limited Purpose, and Dependent Care.
Headspace subscription for employees and dependents.
Gympass+ membership with access to physical gyms.
One Medical membership.
Counseling services through an Employee Assistance Program.