SambaNova · 4 days ago
Principal Cloud Backend Engineer
Palo Alto, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Lead/Staff
10+ years expSambaNova is a pioneering company in the generative AI space, offering a full-stack AI platform optimized for enterprise and government organizations. The Principal Cloud Backend Engineer will architect and build the core platform for large-scale AI inference services, focusing on flexible billing and monetization strategies to drive new revenue streams.
AI InfrastructureAnalyticsArtificial Intelligence (AI)Machine LearningSemiconductorSoftware
Responsibilities
Lead the technical vision and architecture for our inference serving and monetization platform. Design systems that are fault-tolerant, highly available, and can scale to meet growing demand while accurately tracking usage for billing
Architect the core systems for flexible monetization, including:
Designing a flexible system to define and enforce complex usage plans, rate limits, and access policies
Building a highly reliable and accurate system to meter usage (e.g., tokens, requests) at scale and prepare data for billing
Designing clean abstractions and APIs to seamlessly integrate with external billing and payment providers (e.g., Stripe, Metronome)
Architect and implement complex distributed systems involving real-time rate limiting, quota enforcement, and fair-share scheduling for a multi-tenant environment
Identify and eliminate bottlenecks in the end-to-end system, ensuring low-latency request handling while maintaining precise financial accuracy
Serve as a technical leader and mentor. Establish best practices in code quality, testing, and observability for business-critical financial data pipelines
Work closely with Product Management, Finance, and GTM teams to translate business requirements for new pricing models (e.g., subscriptions, pay-as-you-go, custom enterprise plans) into scalable technical solutions
Qualification
Required
10 + years of experience in software engineering, with a significant focus on designing and building large-scale, distributed backend systems in cloud environments
5 + years in a Principal or Lead Engineer role, with a proven track record of architecting, delivering, and operating business-critical platforms
Expert proficiency in one or more of the following: Go, Rust and C++. Deep understanding of concurrency, performance optimization, and systems programming
Deep, hands-on experience with cloud-native technologies (Kubernetes, Docker, etc.) and major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure)
Extensive experience with both SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, Redis) and designing data models for high-throughput, low-latency applications
Strong foundation in API design (REST, gRPC), event-driven architecture, and building resilient microservices
Excellent communication and leadership skills, with the ability to drive technical consensus and articulate complex concepts to a diverse audience
Preferred
Direct Monetization/Billing Experience: Proven experience building or significantly extending platforms for usage-based metering, subscription management, entitlements, or billing systems. Experience with billing providers (e.g., Stripe, Metronome) is a strong plus
Experience in AI/ML Infrastructure: Direct experience building or operating platforms for serving, scaling, and managing AI models (e.g., inference servers, model deployment pipelines)
Benefits
95% premium coverage for employee medical insurance
77% premium coverage for dependents
Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contribution
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
Short/Long term Disability insurance
Basic Life insurance
Voluntary Life insurance
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
Company
SambaNova
SambaNova develops software and hardware for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications.
201-500 employees
H1B Sponsorship
SambaNova has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (31)
2024 (27)
2023 (37)
2022 (41)
2021 (35)
2020 (29)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$1.14BKey Investors
SoftBank Vision FundBlackRockIntel Capital
2023-10-01Secondary Market
2021-04-13Series D· $676M
2020-02-25Series C· $250M
Leadership Team
Rodrigo Liang
Co-Founder & CEO
Annie Weckesser
CMO
Recent News
2026-01-08
2025-12-29
2025-12-14
Company data provided by crunchbase