Forward Deployed Engineer (Frontier AI)

scalr; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

scalr, a frontier AI company building and deploying powerful models, is expanding its Forward Deployed Engineering team across San Francisco and New York. As an FDE, you embed with enterprise customers, scope and deploy AI systems in production environments, and ship production-grade agentic software.

You will write production code alongside customer teams, build integrations on frontier models, fine-tune models for real workloads, and communicate discoveries to executives and engineers.

Qualifications

• Hands-on, customer-facing technical role experience.
• Shipped production code in production environments.
• Strong Python and production code skills.
• Knowledge of inference, model serving and SFT.
• Experience deploying models on GPUs in cloud.

Responsibilities

• Scope, build and deploy AI systems for production environments at enterprise customers.
• Write production code with customer engineering teams.
• Build agentic systems and integrations on frontier models.
• Fine-tune, serve and optimize models for customer workloads.
• Run discovery calls with execs and dive into technical detail with engineers.
• Feed field learnings back to product and research.

Skills

Python

LLM stack

Cloud infrastructure

GPU deployment

Customer-facing

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

A frontier AI company building and deploying some of the most capable models in the world. Enterprise demand is outpacing the team's ability to get models into production, so they're scaling their Forward Deployed Engineering function across SF and NYC.

Every company can get a model working in a demo. Very few can get it running in production inside a real enterprise. As an FDE, you close that gap.

You'll embed with enterprise customers, understand the problem first-hand, and ship production-grade agentic systems that actually get used. You'll solve the last-mile deployment problem: taking customers from AI pilot to real, measurable value.

What you'll do:

• Work directly with enterprise customers to scope, build and deploy AI systems in their production environments
• Write production code alongside customer engineering teams, not just advise them
• Build agentic systems, tool-use chains and integrations on top of frontier models
• Fine-tune, serve and optimize models for real customer workloads
• Run discovery with execs, then go deep with engineers on the technical detail
• Feed what you learn in the field back to product and research

What we're looking for:

• Experience in a hands-on, customer-facing technical role: Forward Deployed Engineer, Applied AI Engineer, Solutions Architect, ML Engineer with field exposure, or technical founder
• A track record of building production software with customers. You've shipped code running in someone else's production environment
• Strong Python. Comfortable reading, writing and debugging production code
• Working knowledge of the LLM stack: inference trade-offs, model serving and fine-tuning workflows (SFT at minimum)
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure or GCP) and deploying models on GPUs
• Exceptional communication. You can run a sharp discovery call, present to a VP, and debug a latency issue with an ML engineer in the same afternoon