Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed

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

Job summary

Wafer in San Francisco is seeking a Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed to run evaluations on customer workloads and drive production on Wafer.

You will own account health, diagnose latency issues, and coordinate with performance engineers to achieve targets. The role emphasizes customer interaction, hands-on problem solving, and building repeatable deployment playbooks.

Qualifications

• Shipped and operated production systems.
• Experience with LLM inference/serving (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM) is a big plus.
• Able to explain results to customers and skeptical engineers.
• Self-driven with ownership and scoped answers when specs are unclear.

Responsibilities

• Run technical evaluation on customer workloads and explain results.
• Get customers into production on Wafer and meet targets.
• Own account health: monitor latency, errors, and usage.
• Scope fixes for engine/kernels/agents and enable engineers with what they need.
• Build tools, integrations, and playbooks for faster deployments.
• Communicate customer needs to engineering and sales to drive roadmap.

Skills

Production systems

LLM inference

Customer relationship

Benchmarking

Problem solving

Job description

Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed

This listing's locations On-site - San Francisco, California, United States

Employment Full-time

Workplace On site

What you'll do

• Run the technical evaluation on the customer's own workload: understand their traffic and latency targets, run the benchmark and explain the result to their engineers.
• Get each customer into production on Wafer, working with our performance engineers and agents to hit their targets.
• Own the health of your accounts. Watch latency, errors and usage, catch problems before the customer does, and be who they hear from.
• When a problem needs a fix in the engine, the kernels or the agents, scope it and bring the right engineer everything they need to solve it.
• Build the tools, integrations and runbooks that make each new deployment faster than the last.
• Tell engineering and sales what customers need next, based on what you see in production.

What we look for

• You are a strong engineer who has shipped and operated production systems. You can read a trace, open a profiler and find the problem yourself.
• Experience with LLM inference or serving, such as vLLM, SGLang or TensorRT-LLM, is a big plus.
• You want to work with customers. You have owned a technical customer relationship and can explain results to a skeptical engineering team.
• You are credible in a room full of engineers. You can defend a benchmark methodology and concede the point when they are right.
• You work without a spec. The problem arrives half-defined and you come back with a scoped answer rather than a list of questions.

How we evaluate

We score every candidate on seven values:

• Infinitely Resourceful
• Exceptionalism
• Unreasonable Standards
• Company Over Self
• High EQ
• Learns Quickly
• First Principles Thinker
• Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Daily lunch and dinner, unlimited PTO, and parental leave.
• $1K/month housing stipend (post-tax) if you live within walking distance (0.5 miles) from the office.
• Relocation allowance and benefits.
• Covered Uber/Waymo from/to office.

How we work

On-site in San Francisco, five days a week. Small team with massive surface area and ownership. You operate with complete autonomy of how to solve problems.

Your success is measured by customers who move their production traffic to Wafer and stay because it keeps getting faster.