Forward Deployed Engineer, Strategic Inference

Fdetimes; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 270,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Startup equity

Health insurance

Flexible remote work

Job summary

Together AI, the AI Native Cloud, is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer focused on inference to partner with strategic customers and production AI teams. You will optimize inference engines, fine-tune pipelines, and guide deployments to achieve targeted throughput and latency.

You will work with SAs as a domain expert, influence customer success, and contribute to platform improvements while supporting high-value POCs and scalable deployments.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in a technical role with focus on system optimization.
• Hands-on experience with inference engines (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, SGLang).
• Deep knowledge of KV cache tuning, speculative decoding, tensor parallelism, and quantization.
• Broad knowledge of state-of-the-art open-source models and model selection.
• Strong Python skills and production-level experience.

Responsibilities

• Optimize inference engines for given hardware and workloads.
• Develop configuration updates to win POCs and benchmarks; tune caches and decoding strategies.
• Act as primary technical contact for strategic accounts; align deployments with milestones.
• Onboard strategic customers with correct inference configurations from day one.
• Help shape product roadmap by surfacing field insights and driving feature adoption.

Skills

Python

Project management

Communication skills

Tools

vLLM

TensorRT-LLM

SGLang

Job description

About the role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) focused on Inference, you will be a hands-on technical partner to our most strategic customers — production AI teams looking to leverage high quality models and do inference at scale. For us, FDE is not a replacement for a Solutions Architect; you will partner with our SAs as a deep-domain specialist in inference optimization, fine-tuning pipelines, and production deployment. As key contributors to both the CX, Engineering, and Sales organizations, FDEs add tremendous value by ensuring we can meet the requirements of our most complex POCs, facilitate successful platform adoption, and guide tailored optimization efforts — directly impacting customer success, company growth, and the hardening of our core platform.

Responsibilities

• Inference Engine Optimization: Select, configure, and optimize inference engine based on hardware, model architecture, and workload profile
• Configuration & Performance Tuning: Develop configuration updates to win critical POCs, benchmarks, and optimize customer deployments; tune KV cache, apply speculative decoding, determine optimal tensor parallelism, and determine quantization strategy to hit throughput and latency targets.
• Strategic Customer Alignment: Act as the primary technical point of contact for aligned strategic accounts — monitoring and optimizing endpoint configurations, helping customers get the most out of the platform, and collaborating to ensure we hit critical milestones.
• Opinionated Onboarding: Establish direct alignment with strategic customers at onboarding; ensure the right inference configurations are in place from day one to improve time-to-value.
• Product Feedback Loop: Directly influence our software and model roadmap by surfacing insights from the field. Contribute back to the product where needed to support customer requirements or drive a better experience. Drive early feature and research adoption with strategic logos.

Qualifications

• Experience: 5+ years in a technical role, with a strong focus on system optimization. Recent experience in inference systems and open-source LLM deployments.
• Inference Engine Depth: Expert-level, hands-on experience with inference engines (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, SGLang); ability to diagnose and resolve performance issues at the engine level.
• Inference Optimization: Deep knowledge of KV cache tuning, speculative decoding, tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, and quantization techniques
• Model Landscape Awareness: Broad knowledge of state-of-the-art open-source models and strong judgment on model selection for specific customer use cases, hardware profiles, and performance targets.
• Coding Proficiency: Strong Python skills; comfortable working in production environments
• Experience leading complex projects with exceptional project management and communication skills

About Together AI

Together AI, the AI Native Cloud, is purpose-built for AI engineers. AI application developers get high-performance inference that scales reliably, fine-tuning and reinforcement learning for creating frontier-level specialized models, and pre-training at massive scale for fully custom intelligence, all around a marketplace of leading open models that teams can run, adapt, and own. Trusted by Cursor, Decagon, ElevenLabs, Salesforce, and Zoom, Together serves 400+ trillion tokens a month.

Compensation

We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance, and other benefits, as well as flexibility in terms of remote work. The US base salary range for this full-time position is: $270,000 - $300,000 OTE + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by location, level and role. Individual compensation will be determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge.

Equal Opportunity

Together AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and more.

Please see our Privacy Policy at https://www.together.ai/privacy