Director of Engineering - Inference Platform - San Jose, California, United States
$245,000 - $325,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 2 June 2026 by the employer.
Lead the SambaStack software engineering team building the inference serving platform on Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) hardware.
About the role
The SambaStack team is seeking an Engineering Director to lead a software engineering team while remaining a hands-on technical contributor. You will own the growth and effectiveness of your team, the roadmap for the inference serving platform, and design systems and write code on RDU hardware platform challenges.
What you'll do
- Lead, grow, and manage a software engineering team while defining roles, hiring engineers, and driving career development. - Contribute directly as a software engineer by designing systems, writing code, and leading implementation on critical platform initiatives. - Participate in and lead design reviews, providing technical guidance on major features and cross-cutting architectural changes. - Establish and uphold engineering standards, best practices, and code quality across the team. - Proactively identify and resolve systemic risks including performance bottlenecks, reliability gaps, and scaling constraints. - Partner with Product, ML, QA, and DevOps leadership to align team priorities and remove blockers.
What you'll need
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading and managing engineering teams. - Demonstrated ability to manage, develop, and hire engineers while remaining a hands-on technical contributor. - Strong technical depth in backend systems built with Python, Go, or Rust. - Experience with AI inference serving, orchestration, and the infrastructure challenges of LLM workloads at production scale. - Experience running iterative engineering processes.
Nice to have
- 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 an AI infrastructure company.
Skills: AI inference platforms, Kubernetes, distributed systems, backend systems, Python, Go
This role has been open 143 days — well above the 52-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · Infrastructure Platform
|
Open roles in category
1012
|
Median days open
52 d
|
Median salary
$224k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | SambaNova | All employers we track in this specialty (1012 roles · 89 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 11 | 1012 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 25 | 6297 · 144 employers |
| Median days open | 64 d | 52 d (+12 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $224k |
Skills observed across this category: AI inference platforms, Kubernetes, distributed systems, backend systems, Python, Go
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 291 open roles · median 52 d
- Qualcomm · 65 open roles · median 51 d
- AMD · 57 open roles · median 25 d
- Graphcore · 51 open roles · median 99 d
- Intel Corporation · 48 open roles · median 13 d
- Cerebras · 35 open roles · median 89 d
How we counted: 1012 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (Infrastructure Platform) roles from 89 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 24 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.
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