Senior Principal AI Solutions Engineer

<div class="content-intro"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></p></div><p>We are looking for a Senior Principal AI Solutions Engineer: a hands-on technical leader who sets the technical direction for our solutions portfolio and still builds. This is someone who can go from a customer problem to a polished, working, agentic application in days, and then harden it for production. You will work across the whole modern AI stack: open-weight models, agent frameworks and tool use, self-improving evaluation loops, multimodal and voice pipelines, and the front end that makes it all usable by knowledge workers. You will lead hands-on engagements with our most strategic customers, mentor and raise the bar for the wider solutions team, and feed what you learn back into the platform. </p> <p><strong>Responsibilities </strong></p> <p><strong>Build agentic and self-improving systems </strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Agentic AI Architecture: </strong>Design and build single- and multi-agent systems with planning, tool and function calling, MCP, memory, and long-running workflows that are reliable enough for production • <strong>Self-Improving Systems: </strong>Build feedback loops that make agents better over time, including automated evals, LLM-as-judge, trace-driven prompt and program optimization (e.g. DSPy-style), synthetic data generation, and fine-tuning from production signals</li> <li><strong>Evaluation and Observability: </strong>Set up eval harnesses, tracing and guardrails so customers can measure quality, cost and latency, and trust what they deploy </li> </ul> <p><strong>Get the most from open models </strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Open-Weight Model Expertise: </strong>Choose, adapt and combine open models (e.g. Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, gpt-oss, Gemma, GLM) for customer use cases, including LoRA/PEFT fine-tuning, distillation and model routing </li> <li><strong>Performance and Benchmarking: </strong>Benchmark end-to-end solutions, not just tokens per second, and show where fast inference changes what an application can do </li> <li><strong>Model Integration: </strong>Validate new models and capabilities on SambaNova's platform stack and report gaps to Product and Engineering </li> </ul> <p><strong>Ship full-stack vertical solutions </strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Front-End and Product Build: </strong>Build polished, usable web applications (e.g. React/Next.js, TypeScript) that non-technical knowledge workers can adopt, not just notebooks and APIs </li> <li><strong>Vertical Knowledge Work: </strong>Build domain solutions for areas such as financial services, legal, healthcare, public sector and research: document analysis, research agents, RAG and knowledge assistants, report generation and workflow automation </li> <li><strong>Multimodal Solutions: </strong>Build vision-language and document-understanding pipelines (OCR, charts, forms, images, video) combined with agentic reasoning </li> <li><strong>Audio and Voice: </strong>Build real-time voice agents and audio pipelines (ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech, streaming and turn-taking) where low latency is the product </li> </ul> <p><strong>Lead with customers and shape the platform </strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Solutions Technical Strategy: </strong>Set the technical direction for the solutions portfolio: which agentic, multimodal and vertical patterns we invest in, the shared frameworks and components we build, and the engineering standards they meet </li> <li><strong>Technical Leadership and Mentorship: </strong>Act as the senior technical authority across solutions engineering; review designs, mentor engineers and lift the quality of everything the team ships </li> <li><strong>Executive Engagement: </strong>Act as the trusted technical advisor to customer CTOs and AI leaders on architecture, build-versus-buy and scaling AI across the enterprise </li> <li><strong>Customer Engagement: </strong>Lead technical discovery, workshops, hackathons and hands-on co-builds with strategic customers, from prototype to production </li> <li><strong>Reference Architectures: </strong>Publish reference architectures, starter kits, open-source examples and best-practice guides that scale beyond each engagement </li> <li><strong>SambaStack Tooling: </strong>Develop tooling and automation for SambaStack deployment, management and integration </li> <li><strong>Product Feedback: </strong>Feed what you learn in the field (model requests, feature gaps, developer experience) into the model roadmap and platform priorities </li> <li><strong>Thought Leadership: </strong>Represent SambaNova through demos, talks, blogs and community con