Forward Deployed Engineer San Francisco · Engineering · Full Time →

Reactor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Early equity

Visa sponsorship

Relocation support

Health, dental, and vision coverage

Job summary

Reactor, based in San Francisco, is seeking a skilled ML Engineer to integrate partner models onto our infrastructure. This role demands travel to leading model labs and involves optimizing performance to enable real-time interactive experiences. Candidates should possess 3+ years of experience in ML engineering, strong skills in Python and PyTorch, and the ability to make impactful product decisions.

We offer competitive salaries, early equity opportunities, and support for visa and relocation, along with generous health and dental benefits.

Qualifications

• 3+ years in ML engineering or a technical role working directly with external teams.
• Comfortable reading and writing Python at production level.
• Strong knowledge of PyTorch and modern ML inference optimization techniques.

Responsibilities

• Travel to model labs, integrate their models onto Reactor's infrastructure.
• Profile and optimize model performance for latency and throughput.
• Make product decisions that shape Reactor's future.

Skills

ML engineering

Python

PyTorch

Model performance optimization

Job description

This role sits at the intersection of ML engineering and customer partnership. You will be the person who makes it real for our lab partners, going on-site to their offices, understanding their models deeply, and doing whatever it takes to get them running at production quality on Reactor's infrastructure.

This is not a support role. You will be making critical technical and product decisions and working directly with the founders. You will be one of the first people to define what forward deployment looks like at Reactor.

What You'll Do

• Travel to top world model labs, integrate their models onto Reactor's infrastructure, and own the deployment end to end
• Profile and optimize model performance to hit the latency and throughput targets that make real-time interactive video feel real
• Be the voice of the lab partner inside Reactor and make product decisions that directly shape what we build next

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years in ML engineering or a technical role working directly with external teams
• Comfortable reading and writing Python at a production level and tracing through inference pipelines to find and fix bottlenecks
• Strong knowledge of PyTorch and modern ML inference optimization techniques
• Comfortable with ambiguity, travel, and getting on a plane to unblock a partner

Nice to Have

• Experience with diffusion models, video generation, or world models
• Familiarity with real-time streaming systems
• CUDA kernel optimization, TensorRT, or custom inference frameworks
• Existing relationships in the generative video or foundation model ecosystem
• Competitive SF salary and meaningful early equity
• Visa sponsorship and relocation support
• Generous health, dental, and vision coverage