Senior Director, Business Operations & NPI

SambaNova is a leader in next-generation AI infrastructure, delivering a full-stack inference platform for customers worldwide. At the core of SambaNova's technology is the RDU (Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit) — a chip built on a dataflow architecture rather than the traditional GPU model. Its decode performance is especially strong for agentic workloads like multi-turn agents, code generation, and long-running applications. RDUs are packaged into SambaRack, rack-scale hardware that lets customers deploy state-of-the-art models with better performance, greater energy efficiency, and faster time to value. The era of pervasive AI has arrived. SambaNova builds the chips, systems, and cloud services that make high-performance AI inference practical at scale. Our fifth-generation Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU), the SN50, is purpose-built for agentic AI and fast token generation, and our SambaRack systems are designed to run in the air-cooled data centers customers already have. We work with NeoClouds, AI labs, sovereign AI providers, service providers, and enterprises that want faster tokens at a lower total cost of ownership. SambaNova is growing quickly, and we are expanding our partner and ecosystem work to keep pace. We are looking for people who want to help shape what comes next. About the Role SambaNova is looking for a Senior Director of Business Operations and New Product Introduction (NPI) to help bring SambaNova's silicon and systems to market through a growing ecosystem of partners. You will work directly with the Chief Corporate Development Officer, and you will have a visible, company-level impact from your first week. We are at the forefront of heterogeneous disaggregated inference (HDI), where GPUs and SambaNova RDUs each do what they do best. Interest from OEMs, ODMs, NeoClouds, hyperscalers, and sovereign customers is growing quickly, and we want every partner to have a clear, consistent experience working with us. Many of our engagements today are tailored to the partner. You will help turn what we learn from them into a repeatable playbook: a clear path from first conversation to signed agreement, from prototype to volume shipment, and from first order to lifecycle support. That playbook will make SambaNova easier to work with and become a differentiating moat for the company. This is a rare opportunity to shape how SambaNova works with its partners at a pivotal moment. You will begin by listening to colleagues across the company to understand what is working, where the gaps are, and what each team needs to succeed. From there, you will collaborate with those teams to fill the gaps, connect the pieces, and amplify the work already underway, and you will help create new opportunities across a range of partner and business models. Your technical depth will let you translate what customers and partners need into clear priorities for SambaNova, and your judgment will help the company act on them with confidence. Responsibilities Build the NPI framework and playbook • Define and drive SambaNova's end-to-end NPI flow for partner and OEM engagements, covering partner engagement and agreements, architecture and reference design, development and validation (EVT/DVT/PVT), manufacturing readiness, customer proof of concept, workload validation, acceptance, mass production, and lifecycle support • Set gate criteria, owners, templates, and checklists for each phase, and make them simple enough that teams actually use them • Convert one-off deals into repeatable playbooks by business model and partner type, and keep improving them as we learn • Define the metrics, dashboards, and executive reporting that show where every engagement stands Lead technical project execution across engagements • Run the plan, mileston