Senior Principal Runtime Engineer

SambaNova • San Jose, CA

22h

About The Position

SambaNova builds a full-stack AI inference platform centered on its Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) and SambaRack rack-scale hardware. The Runtime Team develops a high-performance, distributed, and scalable software execution environment for SambaStack and Cloud platforms, supporting data-flow applications such as machine learning training and inference, as well as high-performance computing applications.

The Senior Principal Runtime Engineer will work across the runtime stacks to support AI, ML, and scientific applications in high-performance distributed systems. The role participates in building, testing, and deploying next-generation high-performance compute systems for AI applications at scale, working across software, networking, hardware, and user-facing tools.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• At least 5 years of software engineering experience, often emphasizing distributed systems, networking, or cloud infrastructure.
• Proven experience building, testing, and tuning software for distributed, high-performance systems, with in-depth knowledge of user libraries and runtime stacks.
• Solid understanding of switching and routing, with the ability to configure and debug switches and routers for maximum application performance.
• Significant experience with RDMA and RoCE networking stacks, such as RDMA-based verbs and congestion management.
• Hands-on experience with kernel drivers and system-level software that directly interfaces with hardware.
• Expertise in designing and optimizing systems that handle massive parallel workloads, including machine learning training and inference tasks involving billions of operations per second.
• Deep understanding of hardware-software interaction, including registers, device memory management, and accelerator design.
• Familiarity with distributed systems architecture, including networking, communication protocols, and challenges of scaling compute resources efficiently.
• Hands-on experience with software development tools such as Git, Jenkins, and Jira, and ability to drive automation and continuous integration efforts.
• Ability to design systems at the intersection of hardware and software to optimize performance and reliability.

Nice To Haves

• Experience working with ASIC accelerators.
• Experience designing or working closely with custom hardware accelerators such as ASICs or FPGAs, and understanding their low-level interactions.
• Knowledge of SDN, DPDK, SONiC, or modern networking frameworks.
• Background with distributed communication libraries such as UCX, MPI, or NCCL.
• Familiarity with deploying high-performance systems in distributed, cloud, or data center environments.

Responsibilities

• Develop new and enhanced features for high-performance, scalable ML inference and training applications.
• Develop drivers and kernels for next-generation silicon.
• Eliminate networking bottlenecks to enable high-performance distributed systems.
• Build user-space libraries for high performance and high utilization of hardware resources.
• Develop user-facing tools for Datascale systems, including analysis, job and hardware management, profiling, and debugging tools.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Hardware, ML Application, Compiler, and DevOps teams.
• Build, test, and deploy next-generation high-performance compute systems for AI applications at scale.

Benefits

• Competitive total rewards package including base salary and equity.
• Employee medical insurance with 95% of premiums covered and dependent coverage with 77% of premiums covered.
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contribution.
• Dental, vision, short- and long-term disability, basic life, voluntary life, and AD&D insurance plans.
• 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