Senior Director, Business Operations & NPI

SambaNova Systems•San Jose, CA

About The Position

SambaNova is seeking a Senior Director of Business Operations and New Product Introduction (NPI) to help bring its silicon and systems to market through a growing ecosystem of partners. The role works directly with the Chief Corporate Development Officer and has visible, company-level impact. The position will help create a consistent, repeatable partner experience, translating lessons from partner engagements into playbooks that cover the path from initial conversation and agreement through prototyping, volume shipment, and lifecycle support. The role begins with listening to colleagues across the company to understand current processes and gaps, then collaborating with teams to connect existing work, address needs, and create opportunities across partner and business models. It requires technical depth to translate customer and partner needs into company priorities and sound judgment to guide decisions. The Senior Director will define and drive end-to-end NPI processes for partner and OEM engagements, lead technical execution across concurrent engagements, support commercial agreements and lifecycle operations, and develop ecosystem and go-to-market capabilities. The role spans work with engineering, sales, supply chain, quality, support, marketing, finance, and legal teams.

Responsibilities

Define and drive SambaNova's end-to-end NPI flow for partner and OEM engagements, covering partner engagement and agreements, architecture and reference design, development and validation (EVT/DVT/PVT), manufacturing readiness, customer proof of concept, workload validation, acceptance, mass production, and lifecycle support.
Set gate criteria, owners, templates, and checklists for each NPI phase, keeping them practical for teams to use.
Turn one-off deals into repeatable playbooks by business model and partner type, and improve those playbooks as the company learns.
Define metrics, dashboards, and executive reporting to show the status of every engagement.
Manage plans, milestones, dependencies, risks, and action items across concurrent OEM and partner engagements.
Coordinate across silicon, hardware, rack and thermal, firmware, software, supply chain, QA, sales, support, marketing, finance, and legal to secure timely decisions and involvement.
Interpret customer and partner requirements—including architecture, BOM, power and cooling, form factor, test, and qualification—and translate them into SambaNova actions and trade-off decisions.
Track architecture decisions with engineering leaders and identify early when decisions are blocking progress.
Partner with the CCDO, CFO, and Legal to shape customer and partner agreements, including deliverables, roles and responsibilities, milestones, audit functions, and support obligations.
Track engagements from NDA, MOU, LOI, and MSA through orders, forecasting, pricing, delivery, QA support, returns, and revenue recognition.
Structure supply and commercial terms, including NCNR commitments, MOQs, forecast commitments, lead times, and allocation.
Work with sales, product, and marketing on sales enablement, reference architectures, co-sell motions, training, and joint partner launches.
Define software, firmware, and technical support models for partners and their customers.
Help establish QA, RMA, failure analysis, and returns processes aligned with partner expectations of a silicon supplier.

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 life and voluntary life insurance
AD&D insurance
Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options, including 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