Senior Principal Model Bring-up Engineer

The role

You will bring new open-weight LLM architectures up on SambaNova's RDU dataflow accelerators and into production serving. This involves adapting models, mapping them across chips and hosts, compiling, and validating them numerically. You will also build shared inference features like continuous batching and speculative decoding.

What you will do

• Bring up new LLM architectures end to end
• Perform model adaptation, checkpoint conversion, and multi-chip/multi-host mapping
• Compile and perform strict numerical validation
• Handle production serving with latency and throughput numbers
• Build inference features as shared modules including continuous batching, prompt caching, and speculative decoding
• Implement FP8 / FP4, tensor and expert parallelism
• Debug where model, compiler and hardware meet

Required qualifications

• B.S. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field
• 8+ years of industry experience in ML systems, inference, or compiler engineering
• Strong Python and PyTorch internals experience
• Some C++
• Deep transformer-inference knowledge, including KV caching, GQA and sliding window attention, MoE routing, prefill vs decode, batching, and speculative decoding
• Hands-on experience with accelerator bring-up, ML compilers (MLIR, XLA, TVM, Triton, torch-mlir), or inference engines (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM)
• Rigor in numerical debugging
• Comfort with Bazel, Slurm, and large monorepos
• Clear writing and evidence-backed claims

Nice to have

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field
• Experience with dataflow or spatial compilers
• Experience with kernel DSLs
• Experience with FP8 and FP4 inference
• Experience with Mamba and SSMs
• Experience with expert parallelism
• Experience with multi-agent AI engineering workflows
• Open-source inference or compiler contributions

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 like Health Care, Limited Purpose, and Dependent Care
• Headspace subscription
• Gympass+ membership
• One Medical membership
• Counseling services with an Employee Assistance Program

Before you apply

• You must submit an application form for each position for which you believe you are qualified

About the company

SambaNova is a leader in next-generation AI infrastructure, delivering a full-stack inference platform for customers worldwide. Its core technology is the RDU (Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit) built on a dataflow architecture.