Forward Deployment Engineer
SambaNova SystemsResponsibilities
- Embed with strategic enterprise customers to design, build, and deploy production GenAI applications on the SN40L platform and SambaStack portfolio.
- Architect and implement RAG pipelines, multi-agent systems, fine-tuning workflows, coding solutions, and other LLM-powered workflows.
- Optimize inference performance on SambaNova hardware and benchmark throughput, latency, and accuracy.
- Troubleshoot production issues end-to-end across model, software, and hardware layers.
- Translate customer needs into product requirements and engineering feedback.
- 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.
- Present technical findings, architecture decisions, and roadmap input to customers and internal teams, and represent SambaNova at industry events.
Requirements
- At least 5 years of hands-on engineering experience with a strong record of shipping production AI/ML systems.
- Deep expertise in LLM orchestration, RAG, agentic frameworks, prompt engineering, and evaluation pipelines.
- Strong knowledge of model training, fine-tuning, inference optimization, quantization, and performance benchmarking.
- Python proficiency is required; C++ or CUDA experience is a strong plus.
- Experience deploying AI workloads on AWS, Azure, or GCP and familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, and MLOps tooling.
- Ability to conduct technical discovery, set expectations, push back constructively, and present to executive and practitioner audiences.
- Bachelor's or graduate degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience with AI accelerators or custom silicon, CUDA or low-level GPU programming, VLLM or SGLang, or enterprise AI deployments in regulated industries is a bonus.
- Willingness to travel up to 50% to customer sites.
Benefits
- Competitive total rewards package including equity and benefits for US-based full-time employment positions.
- Employer covers 95% of employee medical insurance premiums and 77% of dependent premiums, with an employer-contributed Health Savings Account.
- Dental, vision, short- and long-term disability, basic life, voluntary life, AD&D, and Flexible Spending Account options are offered.
- Well-being benefits include Headspace, Gympass+, One Medical, counseling services, and an Employee Assistance Program.
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.