SambaNova Systems

During my 13-week internship at SambaNova Systems, I worked across two of the company's enterprise AI products: SambaStudio and SambaCloud. I joined at an interesting point for the company. SambaNova was shifting from primarily enterprise AI infrastructure toward putting its custom hardware directly in the hands of developers, with inference speed becoming a major part of its product story.

For SambaStudio, I redesigned the login experience. The existing page broke in dark mode, relied on outdated iconography, and featured artwork that had little connection to the product. I explored several visual directions and took them through four rounds of design reviews, but while the concepts worked, none of them felt completely right to me. I wanted to try one more illustration-based approach before settling on a direction.

At the time, SambaNova was heavily emphasizing the inference performance of its custom hardware. That pushed me toward using server racks as the central visual metaphor. The concept was not meant to represent the product literally. Users were not connecting directly to a rack of SambaNova servers. Instead, I wanted it to feel as though SambaNova's computing power was sitting right beside their machines, giving them immediate access to that performance. After 56+ iterations, the server-rack direction was approved for production.

For SambaCloud, I was designing for a product that was still taking shape. The platform publicly launched near the end of my internship in September 2024, giving developers direct access to SambaNova's infrastructure and models such as Llama 3.1 405B. That created a different design challenge from SambaStudio. A highly technical infrastructure product now had to make sense to developers who might never think about the hardware underneath it.

I designed the SambaCloud landing page and key pages within the web app, starting by mapping five core personas, from students experimenting with AI to enterprise teams building production applications. I shaped the experience around what those users needed to understand quickly: why the platform was fast, what they could build with it, which starter kits matched their use cases, and how to get started. I took the work from early wireframes through to the final UI and also created a custom icon set for the product.

Across both projects, I was designing around the same broader challenge: making advanced AI infrastructure feel understandable, polished, and approachable. Several of the pieces I contributed are still in production today, even as SambaNova's broader design language has continued to evolve.