Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed

Wafer; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental and vision

Unlimited PTO

Parental leave

Housing stipend

Relocation assistance

Uber/Waymo transportation

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

Wafer in San Francisco seeks a Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed to drive production deployment of AI workloads and collaborate with customers from benchmark to production. You will work with performance engineers to ensure fast, healthy workloads and address production challenges with pragmatic, scoped solutions.

The role emphasizes hands-on engineering, customer interaction and rapid iteration, with on-site work five days a week in San Francisco.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping and operating production systems.
• Ability to read a trace, open a profiler and find the problem.
• Own a technical customer relationship and explain results to a skeptical engineering team.
• Able to defend a benchmark methodology and adapt approaches without a full spec.

Responsibilities

• Run the technical evaluation on the customer's workload, understand traffic and latency targets, and explain results.
• Get each customer into production on Wafer, collaborating with engineers to meet targets.
• Own the health of accounts: monitor latency, errors and usage, and engage proactively.
• Scope fixes across engine, kernels or agents and provide the right data for engineering.
• Build tools, integrations and runbooks to accelerate deployments with each release.
• Communicate customer needs to engineering and sales based on production observations.

Skills

Production systems

Customer relations

Benchmarking

LLM inference

Job description

Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed

At Wafer, we are building AI systems that automatically optimize inference workloads across silicon. Wafer is well funded and serves trillions of tokens a month for mission-critical workloads at fast-growing AI startups.

Forward deployed Members of Technical Staff are the engineers our customers work with. You'll take each customer from first benchmark to production, and keep their workloads fast and healthy after that. Our performance engineers and optimization agents do most of the tuning. You make sure it lands for each customer and stays that way.

This is its own track, with the same bar as the rest of our technical staff. Sales finds customers and closes them. You are the engineer beside them from the first benchmark onward, not a salesperson.

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:

1. Infinitely Resourceful

2. Exceptionalism

3. Unreasonable Standards

4. Company Over Self

5. High EQ

6. Learns Quickly

7. First Principles Thinker

Benefits

• 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.

• Visa sponsorship available.

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.