Senior ML Infrastructure Engineer
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External SambaNova Systems
San Jose, CA, US
Summary
Lead compiler engineering by driving innovation in infrastructure and optimization algorithms to enhance ML model performance on the SambaNova platform. Coordinate across development teams to map operations to underlying hardware and implement enterprise-grade products.
Job Description
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.
About the team
The ML Infrastructure team builds and operates the inference stack that serves SambaNova's models on RDU accelerators, from request scheduling and caching through the public APIs in SambaStack and SambaCloud. We take inference techniques like speculative decoding, constrained decoding, and long-context serving from prototype to production, and own the accuracy infrastructure that gates every feature we ship. We work alongside the ML, compiler, runtime, and product teams, since most of what we build touches all four.
About the role
The Senior Software Engineer, ML Infrastructure will be responsible for designing, building, and operating the production-grade inference infrastructure that powers SambaNova's serving stack on our Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) architecture. SambaNova is an inference-first company, and this role sits at the heart of that mission: turning state-of-the-art inference techniques into reliable, high-throughput, low-latency services exposed to customers through SambaStack and SambaCloud. The engineer will own end-to-end systems spanning request scheduling, advanced decoding algorithms, caching layers, API surfaces, and the accuracy infrastructure that keeps the stack trustworthy. This role partners closely with ML, compiler, runtime, and product teams to ship inference features from prototype to production.
Responsibilities
- Design and productionize advanced inference techniques on RDU to optimize for performance and cost. Key areas include speculative decoding, constrained decoding, function/tool calling, prompt caching, and long-context inference.
- Own SambaNova's integration with vLLM and adjacent serving frameworks, adapting them to RDU's architecture.
- Own the public inference API surface exposed through SambaStack and SambaCloud.
- Build and maintain the accuracy verification and regression infrastructure that gates every inference feature shipped to customers.
- Partner with ML, compiler, runtime, and product teams to take inference features from prototype to production.
- Contribute to technical design discussions, code reviews, and architectural decisions as a senior individual contributor.
Required Qualifications
- B.S. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field
- 5+ years of industry experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, ideally in ML serving
- Strong software engineering fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and systems design
- Experience designing and maintaining production services with strict latency, throughput, and availability requirements
- Working knowledge of modern LLM inference techniques and familiarity with open-source serving stacks such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or SGLang
- Proficiency in Python
- Experience collaborating across teams to deliver complex, system-level engineering solutions
Base Salary Range:
Base Pay Range$200,000—$275,000 USD
Submission Guidelines
Please note that in order to be considered an applicant for any position at SambaNova Systems, you must submit an application form for each position for which you believe you are qualified.
EEO Policy
SambaNova Systems is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard basis of age (40 and over), color, disability, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, military or veteran status, national origin/ancestry, race, religion, creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding), sexual orientation, and any other applicable status protected by federal, state, or local laws.
Benefits Summary for US-Based, Full-Time Employment Positions
SambaNova offers a competitive total rewards package, including the base salary, plus equity and benefits. We cover 95% premium coverage for employee medical insurance, and 77% premium coverage for dependents and offer a Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contribution. We also offer Dental, Vision, Short/Long term Disability, Basic Life, Voluntary Life, and AD&D insurance plans in addition to Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options like Health Care, Limited Purpose, and Dependent Care. Our library of well-being benefits available to you and your dependents includes a full subscription to Headspace, Gympass+ membership with access to physical gyms, One Medical membership, counseling services with an Employee Assistance Program, and much more.
Welcome to SambaNova: Revolutionizing AI Capacity
At SambaNova, we're empowering developers, enterprises, governments, and data centers to unlock their full AI potential. Our full-stack infrastructure, from chips to models, enables lightning-fast performance, low power consumption, and high-efficiency computing.
Our Mission
To give every developer, enterprise, government and data center absolute sovereignty over their own data, models and AI infrastructure – to future-proof the AI workloads that will power and scale tomorrow.
Our Technology
We give our customers the optionality to experience SambaNova through the cloud or on-premise.
Samba Cloud delivers the fastest inferences on the largest open source models like Llama 4 and DeepSeek. Developers can get started building in minutes with our OpenAI compatible APIs. All customers start on the developer tier and when they need more capacity can scale into our enterprise tier.
SambaStack is our on-premise offering which includes the system, the platform, and foundation models. These components combine into a powerful technology stack that delivers unparalleled performance, ease of use, accuracy, data privacy, and the ability to power every use case across the world's largest organizations.
SambaManaged is a modular and ready-to-deploy AI cloud designed to deliver unmatched efficiency for data centers and cloud service providers. This solution allows organizations to quickly deploy advanced AI inference services—without the need for costly infrastructure upgrades or specialized expertise—in as little as 90 days.
At the heart of SambaNova innovation is the Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU). Purpose built for AI workloads, the RDU takes advantage of a dataflow architecture and a three-tiered memory design. The three tiers of memory enable the platform to run hundreds of models on a single node and to switch between them in microseconds. In 2023, SambaNova released its 4th generation RDU chip, the SN40L.
Welcome to SambaNova: Revolutionizing AI Capacity
At SambaNova, we're empowering developers, enterprises, governments, and data centers to unlock their full AI potential. Our full-stack infrastructure, from chips to models, enables lightning-fast performance, low power consumption, and high-efficiency computing.
Our Mission
To give every developer, enterprise, government and data center absolute sovereignty over their own data, models and AI infrastructure – to future-proof the AI workloads that will power and scale tomorrow.
Our Technology
We give our customers the optionality to experience SambaNova through the cloud or on-premise.
Samba Cloud delivers the fastest inferences on the largest open source models like Llama 4 and DeepSeek. Developers can get started building in minutes with our OpenAI compatible APIs. All customers start on the developer tier and when they need more capacity can scale into our enterprise tier.
SambaStack is our on-premise offering which includes the system, the platform, and foundation models. These components combine into a powerful technology stack that delivers unparalleled performance, ease of use, accuracy, data privacy, and the ability to power every use case across the world's largest organizations.
SambaManaged is a modular and ready-to-deploy AI cloud designed to deliver unmatched efficiency for data centers and cloud service providers. This solution allows organizations to quickly deploy advanced AI inference services—without the need for costly infrastructure upgrades or specialized expertise—in as little as 90 days.
At the heart of SambaNova innovation is the Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU). Purpose built for AI workloads, the RDU takes advantage of a dataflow architecture and a three-tiered memory design. The three tiers of memory enable the platform to run hundreds of models on a single node and to switch between them in microseconds. In 2023, SambaNova released its 4th generation RDU chip, the SN40L.