Senior Principal AI Solutions Engineer

San Jose · USD 234,000-286,000 · 3+ years experience · Full-time · Posted Sep 29, 2026

At a glance

SambaNova is looking for a Senior Principal AI Solutions Engineer who acts as a hands-on technical leader to set the technical direction for the solutions portfolio while still building.
This role involves going from a customer problem to a polished, working, agentic application in days and then hardening it for production across the modern AI stack.
You will lead hands-on engagements with strategic customers, mentor the wider solutions team, and feed what you learn back into the platform.

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.
Build feedback loops that make agents better over time, including automated evals, LLM-as-judge, trace-driven prompt and program optimization, synthetic data generation, and fine-tuning from production signals.
Set up eval harnesses, tracing and guardrails so customers can measure quality, cost and latency.
Choose, adapt and combine open models for customer use cases, including LoRA/PEFT fine-tuning, distillation and model routing.
Benchmark end-to-end solutions and show where fast inference changes what an application can do.
Validate new models and capabilities on SambaNova's platform stack and report gaps to Product and Engineering.
Build polished, usable web applications that non-technical knowledge workers can adopt.
Build domain solutions for areas such as financial services, legal, healthcare, public sector and research.
Build vision-language and document-understanding pipelines combined with agentic reasoning.
Build real-time voice agents and audio pipelines where low latency is the product.

Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Physics, Statistics or a related field.
8+ years (IC5) or 10+ years (IC6) of industry experience in software, ML or solutions engineering, including 3+ years building LLM-based applications that reached production.
Proven experience building agentic systems: tool and function calling, multi-agent orchestration and frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude Agent SDK or equivalent.
Hands-on experience with open-weight models: serving, prompting, fine-tuning (LoRA/PEFT) and evaluation.
Strong full-stack skills: expert Python plus modern front-end development (TypeScript, React/Next.js), APIs and cloud deployment.
Experience designing evals and benchmarks for LLM applications, covering quality, latency and cost.
Excellent customer communication, with the ability to lead workshops and explain architecture to both executives and engineers.
A track record of technical leadership across teams: setting architecture direction, mentoring senior engineers and owning outcomes for strategic accounts.

Experience building self-improving or learning systems: prompt/program optimization, RL from feedback, synthetic data pipelines or continual fine-tuning
Experience building real-time voice agents (e.g. LiveKit, Pipecat, WebRTC) and working with speech models (ASR/TTS)
Experience with multimodal and vision-language models and document-understanding pipelines
Domain experience in one or more knowledge-work verticals (financial services, legal, healthcare, public sector, scientific research)
Familiarity with inference frameworks (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM) and hardware-aware performance tuning
Experience with MCP, RAG at enterprise scale, and agent security and guardrails
Open-source contributions, public demos or technical content in the AI community

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
Full subscription to Headspace
Gympass+ membership with access to physical gyms
One Medical membership
Counseling services with an Employee Assistance Program

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