Forward Deployed Engineer

Responsibilities

• Act as the de facto CTO for customer accounts on Baseten, owning how workloads are designed, operated, and scaled.
• Translate customer objectives into specifications, proofs of concept, production systems, and success criteria.
• Design evaluations and benchmarks, diagnose quality or performance gaps, and improve inference, post-training, or evaluation workflows.
• Respond to mission-critical failures, lead triage and incident resolution, and remain accountable through deployment of fixes.
• Build tooling, automation, recipes, and reference implementations for evaluation and deployment infrastructure.
• Influence the product roadmap and ship fixes and features into Baseten's codebase.
• Manage multiple accounts, prioritize work, and align customers and internal stakeholders on status and risk.

Requirements

• 1–2 years of software engineering experience shipping and maintaining code in large production systems.
• Experience debugging complex production issues using logs, metrics, and traces.
• Ability to own ambiguous technical problems, make decisions under uncertainty, and collaborate with system owners.
• Interest in working directly with customers and influencing product development.
• Strong communication skills with both technical and executive audiences.
• Curiosity about AI inference and training and infrastructure supporting it.
• Willingness to respond outside regular working hours and participate in an on-call rotation.

Nice-to-haves

• Depth in infrastructure domains such as storage systems or networking, including InfiniBand or RoCE.
• Experience operating distributed compute platforms such as Kubernetes, Slurm, or Ray, particularly for GPU workloads.
• Understanding of LLM architectures and inference engines such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or SGLang.
• Experience profiling and optimizing GPU workloads for training or serving.
• Experience with post-training techniques such as SFT and RL.
• Deep learning experience and fluency with PyTorch or JAX.
• Operational experience with on-call, incident response, and distributed-systems debugging.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance fully covered for employees and dependents.
• Flexible paid time off and company-wide winter break.
• Paid parental leave.
• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot.
• Company-facilitated 401(k).
• Exposure to a variety of machine-learning startups.