Forward Deployment Engineer

The role

The Forward Deployment Engineer will embed with strategic enterprise customers to design, build, and deploy production GenAI applications on the SN40L platform and SambaStack product portfolio. This role involves architecting LLM-powered workflows, optimizing AI inference performance, and troubleshooting production issues across model, software, and hardware layers.

What you will do

• Embed with strategic enterprise customers to design, build, and deploy production GenAI applications
• Architect and implement LLM-powered workflows including RAG pipelines, multi-agent systems, and fine-tuning workflows
• Optimize AI inference performance on SambaNova hardware
• Benchmark model throughput, latency, and accuracy
• Troubleshoot and resolve production issues across model, software, and hardware layers
• Translate customer needs into product requirements and engineering feedback
• Partner with Account Executives and Solutions Engineers to shape technical sales strategy
• Develop reusable accelerators, reference architectures, and internal playbooks
• Present technical findings and architecture decisions at customer briefings and industry events

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on engineering experience shipping production AI/ML systems
• Deep expertise in GenAI application development including LLM orchestration, RAG, agentic frameworks, prompt engineering, and evaluation pipelines
• Strong foundations in ML fundamentals including model training, fine-tuning, inference optimization, quantization, and performance benchmarking
• Proficiency in Python
• Experience deploying AI workloads on cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Familiarity with containerization, orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), and MLOps tooling
• Ability to engage directly with customers, run technical discovery, and present to executive audiences
• 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

Nice to have

• Working knowledge of C++ or CUDA
• Experience with AI accelerators or custom silicon (TPUs etc.)
• CUDA / low-level GPU programming
• Familiarity with VLLM / SGLang
• Enterprise AI deployments in regulated industries

Benefits

• Base salary plus equity
• 95% premium coverage for employee medical insurance
• 77% premium coverage for dependents
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contribution
• Dental, Vision, Short/Long term Disability, Basic Life, Voluntary Life, and AD&D insurance plans
• Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options including Health Care, Limited Purpose, and Dependent Care
• Headspace subscription
• Gympass+ membership
• One Medical membership
• Counseling services through an Employee Assistance Program

About the company

SambaNova is disrupting the AI and high-performance computing space with an integrated hardware and software platform. The company builds next-generation AI infrastructure and an inference serving platform for generative AI and large language models.