Director, Software Engineering

Director, Software Engineering

San Jose, California, United States

Samba Nova Systems employs some of the greatest minds and talent in AI and machine learning. If you’d like to help lead the next generation of AI computing, we want to hear from you.

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.

Samba Nova 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 Samba Nova 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.

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.

This is a 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…