Principal Cloud Platform Engineer

SambaNova Systems; Austin, San Jose (TX, CA); On-site; USD 144,000 - 189,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

HSA with employer contribution

Headspace subscription

Gympass+ membership

Employee Assistance Program

Job summary

SambaNova Systems is seeking a Principal Cloud Platform Engineer to own and optimize our AI inferencing service, spanning on‑prem and cloud regions. You will ensure uptime, low latency, and efficient resource usage while supporting 24/7 operations and incident response.

You will collaborate across software and platform teams, shaping scalable infrastructure, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines for rapid model updates and reliability outcomes.

Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field.
• 3+ years of experience in a Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps role.
• Experience supporting a large‑scale, customer‑facing service in a public cloud environment (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Strong programming and scripting skills in Python, Go, Rust, or Java.
• Proven experience with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Deep understanding of monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog).
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Experience with CI/CD (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD).
• Strong Linux/Unix system administration fundamentals.

Responsibilities

• Shared ownership of the production inferencing service across regions, covering availability, latency, performance, change management, and capacity planning.
• Standing‑up and automating AI infrastructure in new regions.
• Participating in a shared primary/secondary on‑call rotation, and leading incident response.
• Building monitoring, alerting, and dashboards in Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog for service health, model latency and throughput, and accelerator utilization.
• Finding and eliminating performance bottlenecks.
• Designing auto‑scaling policies that handle variable inference loads.
• Managing cloud and on‑prem infrastructure as code in Terraform and Ansible.
• Building CI/CD pipelines that safely deploy new model versions and service updates.
• Forecasting infrastructure needs against the product roadmap and usage trends, and working with finance to manage cloud spend.
• Defining and reporting on SLOs and SLIs for the inferencing platform, using that data to prioritize reliability work.

Skills

SRE/DevOps experience

Public cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure)

Programming: Python/Go/Rust/Java

Docker & Kubernetes

Monitoring & observability (Prometheus

Grafana & Datadog

ELK stack

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)

CloudFormation

CI/CD (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD

Linux/Unix administration

Education

BS in Computer Science or related field

BS in Computer Engineering

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

ELK Stack

Terraform

CloudFormation

Jenkins

GitHub Actions

ArgoCD

Job description

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.

About the team

The Cloud Platform team owns the production inferencing service that serves SambaNova's models to customers on RDU accelerators, including capacity planning, deployment, monitoring, and incident response across regions in the United States, Asia, Europe, and Latin America.

About the role

As a Principal Cloud Platform Engineer, you will be specializing in our AI Inferencing Service and will be the guardian of its reliability, performance, and scalability. You will bridge the gap between software development and operations, applying an engineering mindset to solve operational challenges. Your primary focus will be ensuring our inference endpoints have exceptional uptime, low-latency response times, and efficient resource utilization, directly impacting the experience of our customers and the success of our AI products. This role includes participating in a shared on‑call rotation to maintain 24/7 service reliability.

Responsibilities

• Shared ownership of the production inferencing service across regions, covering availability, latency, performance, change management, and capacity planning
• Standing‑up and automating AI infrastructure in new regions
• Participating in a shared primary/secondary on‑call rotation, and leading incident response
• Building monitoring, alerting, and dashboards in Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog for service health, model latency and throughput, and accelerator utilization
• Finding and eliminating performance bottlenecks
• Designing auto‑scaling policies that handle variable inference loads
• Managing cloud and on‑prem infrastructure as code in Terraform and Ansible
• Building CI/CD pipelines that safely deploy new model versions and service updates
• Forecasting infrastructure needs against the product roadmap and usage trends, and working with finance to manage cloud spend
• Defining and reporting on SLOs and SLIs for the inferencing platform, using that data to prioritize reliability work

Required Qualifications

• B.S. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field
• 3+ years of experience in a Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps
• Experience supporting a large‑scale, customer‑facing service in a public cloud environment (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Strong programming and scripting skills in languages like Python, Go, Rust, or Java
• Proven experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker and Kubernetes)
• Deep understanding of monitoring and observability principles and tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Datadog)
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Experience with CI/CD principles and tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD)
• Strong Linux/Unix system administration fundamentals

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a hybrid environment bridging cloud and on‑premise/data center infrastructure
• Direct experience supporting ML/AI inferencing services in production
• Familiarity with GPU‑accelerated computing and optimizing workloads for NVIDIA GPUs for purposes of mapping to RDUs
• Knowledge of model serving frameworks like vLLM, SGLang or Ray
• Understanding of MLOps principles and practices
• Experience with managing and tuning databases (SQL or NoSQL) and caching systems (Redis, Memcached)

Base Salary Range: Base Pay Range $144,000 - $189,000 USD

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

• 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.