Principal Product Manager

SambaNova • San Jose, CA

1d • $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 the product owner and subject-matter expert for models, translating knowledge of model architecture, benchmarks, adoption, and customer demand—as well as the practical requirements for shipping models—into product decisions, commitments, and launches. This is a deeply technical product role, with hands-on model testing and rapid prototypes to demonstrate the advantages of fast inference.

The position owns model prioritization, per-chip roadmaps, delivery commitments, launches, and roadmap communications. It defines what a fully featured model means across performance, efficiency, infrastructure, cloud, and API capabilities; identifies capability and conformance gaps; and partners with QA and Solutions on launch acceptance criteria and evaluations.

The role also tracks the open-weight model landscape, customer requests, and competitors; tests models using real prompts and agentic tasks; develops demos and mock-ups; and improves the roadmap process and its data pipeline. Success includes establishing ownership of the roadmap and feature framework, improving time-to-model for priority models, ensuring capability gaps and customer requests are tracked, and delivering predictable launches that support field sales.

SambaNova describes its platform as a full-stack inference platform built around the RDU (Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit) and SambaRack rack-scale hardware. The listed base salary range is $190,000–$230,000 USD. For US-based full-time employees, the company describes a total rewards package including base salary, equity, and benefits.

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 product manager for 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.
• Demonstrated ownership of a roadmap and product launches, including prioritizing under constraints, making data-backed trade-offs, and driving cross-functional teams to launch.
• Comfort with data, including building and maintaining prioritization models, dashboards, and scorecards; 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 using Python, notebooks, lightweight UI tools, or 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 methodologies for model quality and feature conformance.
• Background as an ML engineer 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 and maintain a unified, weighted stack rank of candidate models based on customer demand, capabilities, market adoption, recency, strategic value, and engineering effort; refine the rubric, document overrides, and lead regular prioritization reviews.
• Own the roadmap of models by hardware generation, configuration, and performance targets, grounded in measured platform data.
• Turn priorities into dated engineering commitments, track delivery, and lead model 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, infrastructure, cloud, and API capabilities, including tool calling, structured output, reasoning controls, context length, prompt caching, speculative decoding, streaming, log probabilities, and API compatibility.
• 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 launch acceptance criteria and required evaluations.
• Test new models using real prompts, agentic tasks, and feature checks to identify strengths, limitations, 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, and hand promising ideas to Solutions Engineering for productionization.
• Use hands-on findings to inform model rankings, feature requirements, and launch messaging.
• Track open-weight model releases, architectures, benchmarks, and usage signals, and assess their relevance.
• Triage customer, field, and Model Feedback requests; close the loop with requesters and represent demand accurately in the model ranking.
• Compare SambaNova's models, speed, and features with GPU clouds and other inference providers, and inform roadmap and messaging.
• Improve the roadmap process and its data pipeline using tools and sources such as Jira, internal platform APIs, and public signals.

Benefits

• Equity.
• Employee medical insurance with 95% of premiums covered.
• Dependent medical insurance with 77% of premiums covered.
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contribution.
• Dental insurance.
• Vision insurance.
• Short- and long-term disability insurance.
• Basic and voluntary life insurance.
• Accidental Death and Dismemberment (AD&D) insurance.
• Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options for 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.

What This Job Offers

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