The era of pervasive AI has arrived. In this era, organizations will use generative AI to unlock hidden value in their data, accelerate processes, reduce costs, drive efficiency and innovation to fundamentally transform their businesses and operations at scale.
SambaNova Suite™ is the first full-stack, generative AI platform, from chip to model, optimized for enterprise and government organizations. Powered by the intelligent SN40L chip, the SambaNova Suite is a fully integrated platform, delivered on-premises or in the cloud, combined with state-of-the-art open-source models that can be easily and securely fine-tuned using customer data for greater accuracy. Once adapted with customer data, customers retain model ownership in perpetuity, so they can turn generative AI into one of their most valuable assets.
Overview
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.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree 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
Key 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.
Base Salary Range:
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.
Similar Jobs
What you need to know about the Chicago Tech Scene
Key Facts About Chicago Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 245,800; 5.2% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: McDonald’s, John Deere, Boeing, Morningstar
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, fintech, software, logistics technology
- Funding Landscape: $2.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Arch Venture Partners, MATH Venture Partners, Jump Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners
- Research Centers and Universities: Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
