Forward Deployment Engineer
SambaNova Systems3 months ago
Base 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
Forward Deployed
About SambaNova Systems
SambaNova Systems builds full-stack AI infrastructure—custom accelerator chips, systems, and foundation models—delivered as on-prem appliances and cloud APIs for enterprises, governments, and data centers. Its offerings include the SambaNova Suite, Samba Cloud, and on-prem SambaStack, powered by its Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) architecture, including the SN40L chip. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Jose, California, the company is privately held.