Principal Cloud Backend Engineer at SambaNova Systems

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)

• 10 + years of experience in software engineering, with a significant focus on designing and building large-scale, distributed backend systems in cloud environments.
• 5 + years in a Principal or Lead Engineer role, with a proven track record of architecting, delivering, and operating business-critical platforms.
• Expert proficiency in one or more of the following: Go, Rust and C++. Deep understanding of concurrency, performance optimization, and systems programming.
• Deep, hands-on experience with cloud-native technologies (Kubernetes, Docker, etc.) and major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Extensive experience with both SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, Redis) and designing data models for high-throughput, low-latency applications.
• Strong foundation in API design (REST, gRPC), event-driven architecture, and building resilient microservices.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, with the ability to drive technical consensus and articulate complex concepts to a diverse audience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct Monetization/Billing Experience: Proven experience building or significantly extending platforms for usage-based metering, subscription management, entitlements, or billing systems. Experience with billing providers (e.g., Stripe,Metronome) is a strong plus.
• Experience in AI/ML Infrastructure: Direct experience building or operating platforms for serving, scaling, and managing AI models (e.g., inference servers, model deployment pipelines).

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:

• Launch New Business Models: Enable product-led growth through self-service plans, automatic upgrades, pay-as-you-go pricing, and custom enterprise agreements.
• Monetize Efficiently: Create a flexible platform that allows our business to experiment with and deploy new pricing strategies rapidly without complex engineering changes.
• Ensure Financial Accuracy: Build robust, auditable systems for metering usage and generating billing events with high reliability.
• Scale Economically: Design systems that dynamically manage resources and costs, tying infrastructure efficiency directly to business metrics.

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.