Senior Principal AI Solutions Engineer

SambaNova • San Jose, CA

1d • $234,000 - $286,000

About The Position

SambaNova is a leader in next-generation AI infrastructure, delivering a full-stack inference platform for customers worldwide. At the core of SambaNova's technology is the RDU (Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit) — a chip built on a dataflow architecture rather than the traditional GPU model. Its decode performance is especially strong for agentic workloads like multi-turn agents, code generation, and long-running applications. RDUs are packaged into SambaRack, rack-scale hardware that lets customers deploy state-of-the-art models with better performance, greater energy efficiency, and faster time to value.
We are looking for a Senior Principal AI Solutions Engineer: a hands-on technical leader who sets the technical direction for our solutions portfolio and still builds. This is someone who can go from a customer problem to a polished, working, agentic application in days, and then harden it for production. You will work across the whole modern AI stack: open-weight models, agent frameworks and tool use, self-improving evaluation loops, multimodal and voice pipelines, and the front end that makes it all usable by knowledge workers. You will lead hands-on engagements with our most strategic customers, mentor and raise the bar for the wider solutions team, and feed what you learn back into the platform.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Physics, Statistics or a related field
• 8+ years (IC5) or 10+ years (IC6) of industry experience in software, ML or solutions engineering, including 3+ years building LLM-based applications that reached production
• Proven experience building agentic systems: tool and function calling, multi-agent orchestration and frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude Agent SDK or equivalent
• Hands-on experience with open-weight models: serving, prompting, fine-tuning (LoRA/PEFT) and evaluation
• Strong full-stack skills: expert Python plus modern front-end development (TypeScript, React/Next.js), APIs and cloud deployment
• Experience designing evals and benchmarks for LLM applications, covering quality, latency and cost
• Excellent customer communication, with the ability to lead workshops and explain architecture to both executives and engineers
• A track record of technical leadership across teams: setting architecture direction, mentoring senior engineers and owning outcomes for strategic accounts

Nice To Haves

• Experience building self-improving or learning systems: prompt/program optimization, RL from feedback, synthetic data pipelines or continual fine-tuning
• Experience building real-time voice agents (e.g. LiveKit, Pipecat, WebRTC) and working with speech models (ASR/TTS)
• Experience with multimodal and vision-language models and document-understanding pipelines
• Domain experience in one or more knowledge-work verticals (financial services, legal, healthcare, public sector, scientific research)
• Familiarity with inference frameworks (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM) and hardware-aware performance tuning
• Experience with MCP, RAG at enterprise scale, and agent security and guardrails
• Open-source contributions, public demos or technical content in the AI community

Responsibilities

• Build agentic and self-improving systems
• Agentic AI Architecture: Design and build single- and multi-agent systems with planning, tool and function calling, MCP, memory, and long-running workflows that are reliable enough for production
• Self-Improving Systems: Build feedback loops that make agents better over time, including automated evals, LLM-as-judge, trace-driven prompt and program optimization (e.g. DSPy-style), synthetic data generation, and fine-tuning from production signals
• Evaluation and Observability: Set up eval harnesses, tracing and guardrails so customers can measure quality, cost and latency, and trust what they deploy
• Get the most from open models
• Open-Weight Model Expertise: Choose, adapt and combine open models (e.g. Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, gpt-oss, Gemma, GLM) for customer use cases, including LoRA/PEFT fine-tuning, distillation and model routing
• Performance and Benchmarking: Benchmark end-to-end solutions, not just tokens per second, and show where fast inference changes what an application can do
• Model Integration: Validate new models and capabilities on SambaNova's platform stack and report gaps to Product and Engineering
• Ship full-stack vertical solutions
• Front-End and Product Build: Build polished, usable web applications (e.g. React/Next.js, TypeScript) that non-technical knowledge workers can adopt, not just notebooks and APIs
• Vertical Knowledge Work: Build domain solutions for areas such as financial services, legal, healthcare, public sector and research: document analysis, research agents, RAG and knowledge assistants, report generation and workflow automation
• Multimodal Solutions: Build vision-language and document-understanding pipelines (OCR, charts, forms, images, video) combined with agentic reasoning
• Audio and Voice: Build real-time voice agents and audio pipelines (ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech, streaming and turn-taking) where low latency is the product
• Lead with customers and shape the platform
• Solutions Technical Strategy: Set the technical direction for the solutions portfolio: which agentic, multimodal and vertical patterns we invest in, the shared frameworks and components we build, and the engineering standards they meet
• Technical Leadership and Mentorship: Act as the senior technical authority across solutions engineering; review designs, mentor engineers and lift the quality of everything the team ships
• Executive Engagement: Act as the trusted technical advisor to customer CTOs and AI leaders on architecture, build-versus-buy and scaling AI across the enterprise
• Customer Engagement: Lead technical discovery, workshops, hackathons and hands-on co-builds with strategic customers, from prototype to production
• Reference Architectures: Publish reference architectures, starter kits, open-source examples and best-practice guides that scale beyond each engagement
• SambaStack Tooling: Develop tooling and automation for SambaStack deployment, management and integration
• Product Feedback: Feed what you learn in the field (model requests, feature gaps, developer experience) into the model roadmap and platform priorities
• Thought Leadership: Represent SambaNova through demos, talks, blogs and community contributions

Benefits

• equity
• 95% premium coverage for employee medical insurance
• 77% premium coverage for dependents
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contribution
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• Short/Long term Disability insurance
• Basic Life insurance
• Voluntary Life insurance
• AD&D insurance
• Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options like Health Care, Limited Purpose, and Dependent Care
• Headspace subscription
• Gympass+ membership with access to physical gyms
• One Medical membership
• Counseling services with an Employee Assistance Program

What This Job Offers

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