Senior Principal AI Solutions Engineer
$234,000 - $286,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 29 September 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role is for a hands-on technical leader responsible for setting the technical direction for the solutions portfolio and building agentic applications. The work involves the full modern AI stack, from open-weight models and agent frameworks to multimodal and voice pipelines, integrating with the SambaNova platform which uses RDU (Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit) technology.
What you'll do
- Design and build single and multi-agent systems with planning, tool and function calling, MCP, memory, and long-running workflows.
- Build feedback loops for agents using automated evals, LLM-as-judge, trace-driven prompt and program optimization, synthetic data generation, and fine-tuning from production signals.
- Choose, adapt, and combine open-weight models (e.g., Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, gpt-oss, Gemma, GLM) for customer use cases, including LoRA/PEFT fine-tuning, distillation, and model routing.
- Benchmark end-to-end solutions and validate new models and capabilities on SambaNova's platform stack.
- Build polished, usable web applications (e.g., React/Next.js, TypeScript) for knowledge workers.
- Lead technical discovery, workshops, hackathons, and hands-on co-builds with strategic customers.
What you'll need
- Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Physics, Statistics, or a related field.
- 8+ years 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.
Nice to have
- 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 financial services, legal, healthcare, public sector, or 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.
Skills: agentic AI, LLM, fine-tuning, SambaNova platform, full-stack
More semiconductor jobs: SambaNova jobs · San Jose jobs
This role has been open 34 days — well below the 71-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · AI ML Hardware
|
Open roles in category
111
|
Median days open
71 d
|
Category median salary (all employers)
$213k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | SambaNova | All employers we track in this specialty (111 roles · 30 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 3 | 111 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 31 | 6338 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 34 d | 71 d (−37 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $213k |
Skills observed across this category: agentic AI, LLM, fine-tuning, SambaNova platform, full-stack
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 19 open roles · median 71 d
- Qualcomm · 18 open roles · median 56 d
- Graphcore · 8 open roles · median 130 d
- Intel Corporation · 8 open roles · median 24 d
- AMD · 6 open roles · median 36 d
- Micron Technology · 6 open roles · median 57 d
How we counted: 111 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (AI ML Hardware) roles from 30 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 3 Nov 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.