Forward Deployment Engineer
SambaNova SystemsBase Salary
$138k - $170k/yr
Responsibilities
- Embed with strategic enterprise customers to design, build, and deploy production GenAI applications on the SN40L platform and SambaStack portfolio.
- Architect and implement LLM-powered workflows such as RAG pipelines, multi-agent systems, fine-tuning workflows, and coding solutions.
- Optimize inference performance on SambaNova hardware by benchmarking throughput, latency, and accuracy against customer and competitor requirements.
- Troubleshoot production issues end-to-end across model, software, and hardware layers as the primary technical escalation point in the field.
- Translate customer needs into product requirements and engineering feedback for Product and Engineering teams.
- Partner with Account Executives and Solutions Engineers on technical sales strategy, engagement scoping, evaluations, and proof-of-concepts.
- Develop reusable accelerators, reference architectures, and internal playbooks for future deployments.
- Present technical findings, architecture decisions, and roadmap input to customers and internal audiences, and represent SambaNova at industry events.
Requirements
- At least 5 years of hands-on engineering experience shipping production AI/ML systems.
- Deep expertise in LLM orchestration, RAG, agentic frameworks, prompt engineering, and evaluation pipelines, including LangChain, LlamaIndex, and DSPy.
- Strong foundations in model training, fine-tuning, inference optimization, quantization, and performance benchmarking.
- Proficiency in Python; C++ or CUDA experience is a strong plus for hardware-layer debugging.
- Experience deploying AI workloads on AWS, Azure, or GCP and familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, and MLOps tooling.
- Ability to conduct technical discovery, manage customer expectations, present to executive and practitioner audiences, and engage directly with customers.
- Bachelor's or graduate degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or equivalent practical experience.
- Willingness to travel up to 50% to customer sites.
- Experience with AI accelerators or custom silicon, CUDA or low-level GPU programming, VLLM or SGLang, and enterprise AI deployments in regulated industries are bonus qualifications.
Benefits
- Full-time US employees receive medical insurance with 95% employee premium coverage and 77% dependent premium coverage.
- Benefits include an employer-contributed Health Savings Account, Dental, Vision, short- and long-term disability, Basic Life, Voluntary Life, AD&D, and Flexible Spending Accounts.
- Well-being benefits include Headspace, Gympass+, One Medical, counseling services, and an Employee Assistance Program.
- The role requires travel of up to 50% to customer sites, flexible according to engagement needs.
Categories
About SambaNova Systems
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.