Principal Cloud Backend Engineer

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.

About The Role

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Principal or Senior Principal Cloud Backend Engineer to architect and build the core platform that powers our large-scale AI inference services, with a critical focus on enabling flexible billing and monetization strategies. You will own the design and implementation of the systems that not only ensure reliability and scalability but also directly unlock new revenue streams and business models for our AI services.

This is a high-impact role where you will solve complex challenges at the intersection of cloud-native AI infrastructure, metering, and monetization. You will build the foundational systems for usage-based pricing, subscription plans, and dynamic entitlements that serve as the economic engine for our business. If you are passionate about building platforms that are both technically robust and commercially critical, we want to hear from you.

Key Responsibilities

• Platform Architecture & Strategy : 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.
• Monetization Platform Design : Architect the core systems for flexible monetization, including :
• Entitlements & Quota Management : Designing a flexible system to define and enforce complex usage plans, rate limits, and access policies.
• Usage Metering & Aggregation : Building a highly reliable and accurate system to meter usage (e.g., tokens, requests) at scale and prepare data for billing.
• Billing Integration : Designing clean abstractions and APIs to seamlessly integrate with external billing and payment providers (e.g., Stripe, Metronome).
• Distributed Systems Design : Architect and implement complex distributed systems involving real-time rate limiting, quota enforcement, and fair-share scheduling for a multi-tenant environment.
• Performance & Cost Optimization : Identify and eliminate bottlenecks in the end-to-end system, ensuring low-latency request handling while maintaining precise financial accuracy.
• Technical Leadership : Serve as a technical leader and mentor. Establish best practices in code quality, testing, and observability for business-critical financial data pipelines.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration : 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.

Required Qualifications (Senior Principal Level)

Preferred Qualifications

What You'll Work On

As a key leader on our team, you will be at the forefront of building the economic backbone of our inference platform. Your work will directly impact our ability to :

You will be solving challenging problems at the intersection of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and commercial strategy, making our monetization platform a key competitive advantage.

How to Apply

Please submit your resume along with a cover letter. In your cover letter, we encourage you to describe your experience with a large-scale system you've architected, particularly any involving billing, entitlements, or monetization. Highlight the challenges you faced in ensuring scalability, reliability, and accuracy, and how you overcame them.

Submission Guidelines

Please note that in order to be considered an applicant for any position at SambaNova Systems, you must submit an application form for each position for which you believe you are qualified.

EEO Policy

SambaNova Systems is an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard basis of age (40 and over), color, disability, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, military or veteran status, national origin / ancestry, race, religion, creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding), sexual orientation, and any other applicable status protected by federal, state, or local laws.

Benefits Summary for US-Based, Full-Time Employment Positions

SambaNova offers a competitive total rewards package, including the base salary, plus equity and benefits. We cover 95% premium coverage for employee medical insurance, and 77% premium coverage for dependents and offer a Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contribution. We also offer Dental, Vision, Short / Long term Disability, Basic Life, Voluntary Life, and AD&D insurance plans in addition to Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options like Health Care, Limited Purpose, and Dependent Care. Our library of well-being benefits available to you and your dependents includes a full subscription to Headspace, Gympass+ membership with access to physical gyms, One Medical membership, counseling services with an Employee Assistance Program, and much more.