Engineering Manager - Forward Deployed Engineering (LLM)

Responsibilities

Leadership & Team Management

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Forward Deployed Engineers, providing guidance on technical direction, project execution, and professional development.
• Set clear goals and ensure timely, high-quality delivery across multiple customer-facing projects involving LLM deployment and inference optimization.
• Collaborate with leadership to align team priorities with company and customer goals, balancing short-term delivery, widely varying customer priorities, and long-term technical initiatives.
• Player-coach – be a key driver on strategic product initiatives and customer engagements.

Technical Ownership

• Develop and maintain software systems and product features using general-purpose programming languages (Python preferred).
• Drive customer impact by designing, implementing, and deploying Baseten solutions end-to-end (problem framing → evaluation → production deployment → monitoring).
• Deliver with velocity: turn vague objectives into clear specs and well-defined PoCs.
• Optimize and enhance AI/ML projects, contributing to continuous improvement of technical stack.
• Own products and customer projects end-to-end, functioning as engineer, project manager, and product manager.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 1+ year in a leadership or mentorship capacity.
• Strong programming skills in Python, with production experience in building or optimizing ML inference systems.
• Proven experience with LLMs, inference optimization, or serving frameworks (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT, Triton, Hugging Face, Ray Serve).
• Familiarity with observability, profiling, and cost/performance tradeoffs in production ML systems.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Bonus Points

• Experience leading customer-facing engineering teams or working directly with enterprise partners.
• Deep understanding of GPU infrastructure, distributed inference, or model compression techniques.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents.
• Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break.
• Paid parental leave.
• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot.
• Company-facilitated 401(k).
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups.