Director, Software Engineering

About Samba Nova

Join the company that's building the future of AI computing. Samba Nova is disrupting the AI and high-performance computing space with an integrated hardware and software platform.

Our Samba Stack inference serving platform is pushing the boundaries of inference serving for generative AI and large language models. We are a team of passionate innovators tackling some of the world's most challenging computational problems.

Samba Nova is hiring a Software Engineering Manager for the Samba Stack platform.

We help enterprises and service providers host their own AI inference platforms, powered by our state-of-the-art RDU (Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit) hardware architecture. Our cloud‑agnostic, enterprise‑grade inference serving platform enables seamless deployment, management, and scaling of foundation model workloads at production scale.

As an Engineering Manager on the Samba Stack team, you will lead a high‑performing team of engineers while remaining a hands‑on technical contributor. You will be responsible for the growth and effectiveness of your team, the technical quality of their output, and driving key engineering initiatives while continuing to contribute directly on the platform's most important challenges.

High‑impact, high‑visibility role combining:

• People leadership and team development
• AI infrastructure
• Enterprise software
• Systems architecture and design

• Lead, grow, and inspire a software team, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Own hiring for your team: define roles, assess candidates, and build a diverse, high‑performing engineering organization.
• Drive the career development of your engineers through regular 1:1s, meaningful feedback, and clear growth plans.
• Set clear goals and expectations, track team progress, and remove blockers to keep the team executing effectively.
• Partner with Product, ML, QA, and Dev Ops leadership to align team priorities with broader organizational objectives.
• Champion a healthy, inclusive engineering culture within the Samba Stack engineering organization.

• Contribute directly as a software engineer: designing systems, writing code, and leading implementation on critical platform initiatives.
• Participate in and lead design reviews, providing authoritative technical guidance on major features and cross‑cutting changes.
• Establish and uphold engineering standards, best practices, and coding quality across the team.
• Proactively identify and drive the resolution of systemic risks: performance bottlenecks, reliability gaps, and scaling constraints.
• Mentor engineers at all levels, growing technical depth and architectural thinking across the team.
• Stay current on emerging technologies and AI inference trends to inform the team's technical direction.

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading and managing engineering teams.
• Demonstrated ability to manage, develop, and hire strong engineers while remaining a hands‑on technical contributor.
• Strong technical depth in backend systems built with Python, Go, or Rust.
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes, distributed systems principles, and building scalable, reliable services.
• Proven ability to drive engineering excellence across an engineering team.
• Excellent communication skills: able to work effectively with engineers, cross‑functional partners, and senior leadership.
• Experience running iterative engineering processes in a fast‑paced environment.

• Familiarity with AI inference serving, orchestration, and the infrastructure challenges of LLM workloads at production scale.
• Experience with Kubernetes ecosystem tooling, including Operators and Helm Charts.
• Background in ML application optimization and productionization.
• Experience building or managing teams that deliver cloud‑native platforms for enterprise customers.
• Familiarity with AI coding assistants and the developer tooling ecosystem.
• Experience at a high‑growth AI infrastructure company.

Samba Nova Systems is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants…