Forward Deployed Engineer – AI Inference & Scale

FDE Times; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive equity

100% US medical/dental/vision

Flexible PTO with Winter Break

Paid parental leave

Fertility stipend

401(k) employer match

Exposure to ML startups

Job summary

Baseten is hiring forward-deployed engineers to work with premier AI customers, owning workloads from design through production. You’ll frame problems, build PoCs, and implement robust evals to ensure scalable, high‑quality inference systems.

You’ll also lead incident response, create tooling for faster deployments, and influence Baseten’s roadmap with customer insights. The role emphasizes hands-on engineering across distributed systems, GPUs, and modern ML frameworks, with on‑call

Qualifications

• 1–2 years of software engineering experience shipping and maintaining code in production systems.
• Experience debugging complex production issues using logs, metrics, and traces.
• Ability to own ambiguous technical problems and decide when to involve others.
• Motivation to work directly with customers and influence the product.
• Clear communication on complex technical topics with customers or leadership.
• Genuine curiosity about AI inference and training and the infra powering it.
• Willingness to on-call and respond outside regular hours.

Responsibilities

• Act as account CTO on Baseten, owning workload design, run, and scaling for customers.
• Turn objectives into shipped solutions: frame problems, define specs, build PoC, and productionize.
• Design evals/benchmarks to isolate quality or performance gaps and address them.
• Lead incident response and triage, directing fixes to owning teams until delivery.
• Build internal tooling and automation for eval and deployment infrastructure.
• Shape the product roadmap by channeling customer needs into Baseten’s codebase.

Skills

Software engineering

Debugging production issues

Customer interaction

Communication

On-call

Curiosity about AI inference

Tools

Kubernetes

Slurm

Ray

vLLM

TensorRT-LLM

SGLang

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

Baseten is hiring forward-deployed engineers to work with premier AI customers, owning workloads from design through production. You’ll frame problems, build PoCs, and implement robust evals to ensure scalable, high‑quality inference systems.

You’ll also lead incident response, create tooling for faster deployments, and influence Baseten’s roadmap with customer insights. The role emphasizes hands-on engineering across distributed systems, GPUs, and modern ML frameworks, with on‑call