Forward Deployed Engineers (AI)

Location: San Francisco, United States; hybrid

Salary: $200,000–$400,000 per year plus equity

Company

Baseten provides inference infrastructure and developer tooling that help AI companies bring advanced models into production.

What you will do

• Own technical outcomes for customer workloads, from problem framing and specifications through proof of concept and production deployment.
• Design evaluations and benchmarks, optimize inference, improve models through post-training, and refine evaluation workflows.
• Respond to mission-critical incidents, diagnose root causes, implement fixes, and coordinate with owning teams until resolution.
• Build tooling, automation, deployment infrastructure, recipes, and reference implementations to make engagements more efficient and self-serve.
• Translate customer needs into product roadmap improvements and ship fixes and features in the Baseten codebase.
• Manage multiple customer engagements while aligning 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 involve system owners when needed.
• Strong communication skills with customer engineers and leadership.
• Interest in AI inference, training, and the infrastructure that supports them.
• Willingness to respond to customers outside regular working hours and participate in an on-call rotation.

Nice to have

• Expertise in storage, networking, InfiniBand, RoCE, or other infrastructure domains.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Slurm, or Ray for GPU workloads.
• Knowledge of LLM architectures and inference engines such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or SGLang.
• GPU workload profiling and optimization experience.
• Experience with SFT, reinforcement learning, PyTorch, JAX, or deep learning.
• Operational experience with on-call, incident response, and distributed systems debugging.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive compensation with meaningful equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance fully covered for employees and dependents.
• Flexible PTO and company-wide Winter Break from Christmas Eve through New Year's Day.
• Paid parental leave and a fertility and family-building stipend.
• Company-facilitated 401(k).
• Exposure to ML startups and mission-critical AI workloads.