Forward Deployed Engineer (Training)

Doist; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity

Medical, dental, vision insurance for

Flexible PTO including Winter Break

Paid parental leave

Fertility stipend via Carrot

401(k)

Learning opportunities with ML StartuP

Job summary

Baseten is looking for Forward Deployed Engineers who work directly with top AI customers to own technical outcomes on Baseten. You’ll handle the hardest problems in serving and improving models at scale, from inference to post-training, and drive solutions across the full model lifecycle.

You will act as the customers’ CTO on Baseten, framing problems, defining specs and success criteria, building PoCs, and delivering production-ready solutions.

Qualifications

• 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 to root causes.
• Ability to own ambiguous technical problems and decide when to involve others.
• Motivation to work directly with customers and influence product.
• Strong communication on complex topics with customers' engineers or leadership.
• Genuine curiosity about AI inference and training and infrastructure for it.
• Willingness to respond to customers outside regular hours and participate in on-call rotation.

Responsibilities

• Own technical outcomes for Baseten accounts, ensuring workloads are designed, run, and scaled.
• Frame problems, define specs, build PoCs, and ship to production quickly with the right tools.
• Design evals and benchmarks to isolate quality or performance gaps and close them.
• Be the first responder to mission-critical failures, triage, and own fixes until shipping.
• Shape Baseten's product by feeding customer needs into the roadmap and implementing fixes in the codebase.

Skills

Production systems

Production debugging

Ambiguity ownership

Customer engagement

Cross-team communication

AI inference & training curiosity

On-call readiness

Job description

ABOUT BASETEN

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products.

THE ROLE

Forward Deployed Engineers work directly with the largest and fastest-growing AI companies in the world, owning their technical outcomes on Baseten and taking on the hardest problems in serving and improving models at scale. The work spans the model lifecycle: inference, post-training, and the systems that tighten the loop between them. Act as each account's de facto CTO on Baseten, with final accountability for how their workloads are designed, run, and scaled. Take customer objectives from vague to shipped: frame the problem, define the spec and success criteria, build the PoC, and carry it through to production quickly, using the right tools for the problem. Design the evals and benchmarks that isolate where quality or performance falls short, then close the gap yourself, whether that means optimizing inference, improving the model through post-training, or reworking the eval itself. Be the first responder to mission-critical failures including triage, owning the fix directly or route to the owning team and stay accountable until it ships. Build internal systems so that each engagement is faster than the last. This includes tooling and automation for eval and deployment infrastructure, and the recipes and reference implementations that make the product more self-serve. Shape the product itself, channeling what your accounts need into the roadmap and shipping fixes and features into Baseten's codebase yourself. Do all of this across multiple accounts at once, sequencing the work, pulling in the right people at the right time, and keeping customers and internal stakeholders aligned on status and risk.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Minimum 1-2 years of software engineering experience, shipping and maintaining code in large production systems, ideally with breadth across the stack
• Experience debugging complex production issues - working through logs, metrics, and traces to root-cause problems in unfamiliar systems
• Confidence owning ambiguous technical problems. This includes triaging, making decisions under uncertainty, and knowing when to pull in other engineers who own the underlying systems
• Motivation beyond pure engineering. An interest in wanting to work directly with customers, understand their problems firsthand, and influence the product
• Clear communication on complex technical topics, whether you're talking to a customer's engineers or their leadership
• Genuine curiosity about AI inference and training, and a drive to become an expert in the infrastructure powering it
• Willingness to respond to customers outside regular working hours and participate in an on-call rotation
• Excitement about solving problems for some of the largest and fastest-growing companies in the world running mission-critical AI workloads

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

We don't expect any one person to cover all of this - the strongest candidates may spike in one or two of the following:

• Depth in a core infrastructure domain such as storage systems or networking (anywhere from the cloud layer to cluster interconnects like InfiniBand and RoCE)
• Experience operating distributed compute platforms like Kubernetes, Slurm, or Ray, especially for GPU workloads
• A detailed understanding of LLM architectures and modern inference engines like vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or SGLang
• The ability to profile and optimize GPU workloads, in training or serving
• Hands-on experience with post-training techniques like SFT and RL, or a broader deep learning background plus fluency in a tensor computation library like PyTorch or JAX
• Operational depth - running on-call, leading incident response, debugging distributed systems under pressure

BENEFITS

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
• Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
• Paid parental leave
• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
• Company-facilitated 401(k)
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities

At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).