Forward Deployed Engineers (AI)

Location: Hybrid in San Francisco or New York, United States

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

Company

Baseten provides inference infrastructure, applied AI research, and developer tooling that help AI companies deploy and operate cutting-edge models in production.

What you will do

• Own the technical outcomes of multiple customer accounts, acting as the primary technical owner for workloads deployed on Baseten.
• Turn ambiguous customer objectives into specifications, proofs of concept, success criteria, and production deployments.
• Design evaluations and benchmarks, optimize inference, improve models through post-training, and close quality or performance gaps.
• Respond to mission-critical incidents, perform triage, own fixes, and remain accountable through resolution.
• Build evaluation and deployment automation, internal tooling, recipes, and reference implementations.
• Influence the product roadmap and ship fixes and features in the Baseten codebase while coordinating customers and internal stakeholders.

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 the appropriate system owners.
• Strong communication skills with customer engineers, technical leaders, and internal stakeholders.
• Interest in AI inference, training, and the infrastructure that supports them.
• Willingness to support customers outside regular working hours and participate in an on-call rotation.

Nice to have

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

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive compensation with meaningful equity.
• U.S. employees and dependents receive full medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Flexible PTO and a company-wide winter break.
• Paid parental leave and a fertility and family-building stipend.
• U.S. employees receive access to a company-facilitated 401(k).
• Exposure to ML startups and mission-critical AI workloads.