Senior Director, Business Operations & NPI
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 partner ecosystem. The role works directly with the Chief Corporate Development Officer (CCDO) and has company-level impact. The position will establish a repeatable partner experience and playbook spanning the path from initial discussions and agreements through prototypes, volume shipments, and lifecycle support. The role will assess existing processes, work with teams across the company to address gaps, and help create opportunities across partner and business models. It requires translating customer and partner needs into clear priorities and helping the company make informed decisions. The role combines NPI process development, technical project execution, commercial lifecycle coordination, and ecosystem go-to-market development. It works across engineering, operations, commercial, and corporate functions to coordinate partner and OEM engagements.
Responsibilities
- Define and drive an end-to-end NPI flow for partner and OEM engagements, from partner engagement and agreements through architecture, reference design, development and validation (EVT/DVT/PVT), manufacturing readiness, proof of concept, workload validation, acceptance, mass production, and lifecycle support.
- Set phase gate criteria, owners, templates, and checklists, and make them practical for teams to use.
- Turn one-off deals into repeatable playbooks by business model and partner type, and improve those playbooks based on experience.
- Define metrics, dashboards, and executive reporting to show the status of engagements.
- Manage plans, milestones, dependencies, risks, and action items across concurrent OEM and partner engagements.
- Coordinate teams across silicon, hardware, rack and thermal, firmware, software, supply chain, QA, sales, support, marketing, finance, and legal to ensure the right people and decisions are in place.
- Help 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 flag decisions that are blocking progress.
- Work 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 such as 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 and voluntary life insurance
- AD&D insurance
- Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options for 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
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
