Technical Program Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

Baseten; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Baseten is looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to join our swat team, solving hard inference problems for marquee customers. You will own operating rhythms for top accounts, coordinate across SA, Sales, Product and Engineering, and ensure clear ownership, cadence, and SLAs.

In this high-visibility role, you’ll help scale the team, reduce toil, and build metrics that matter. You’ll partner with leadership to drive deployments, capacity planning, and customer enablement across critical

Responsibilities

• Run the priority account cadence: daily hot-account check-ins, weekly forest view with leadership, and account list with Sales leadership.
• Connects to SA, Sales, Product, engineering (inference, infra), capacity and on-call with clear owners, cadence, and SLA.
• Handle non-P0 escalations to engineering; track and burn down weekly.
• Capture customer patterns and gaps for the product roadmap.
• Drive cross-team programs for large customers: capacity rollouts, cluster migrations, capacity reservations, large launches.
• Coordinate multi-team efforts to run on a plan, not heroics, reducing toil and protecting platform time.
• Monitor incidents and routing changes; work with engineering leads to minimize obstacles and preserve time for product work.
• Own the metrics: report account health, response times, toil, load per engineer, team health to leadership.
• Scale the team with new-hire enablement, certification, and balanced load; partner with Recruiting on hiring ops.
• Manage dependencies and risks with cross-team visibility.

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 ship AI products.

THE ROLE

Forward Deployed Engineering is Baseten’s swat team. We’re deeply technical, great with customers and fast, and we make the platform better with everything we learn in the field. FDEs take on the hardest inference problems for our most strategic customers: novel architectures, extreme scale, tight latency budgets. Then we turn those solutions into a platform no one can match. We’re scaling the team quickly. We need someone to build the operating system that lets a fast-growing team of engineers stay focused on hard problems instead of coordination. This is a high-visibility role with direct exposure to our largest customers and to company leadership. You’ll shape how a new kind of engineering team operates in the AI industry.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Run the priority account cadence. Own the operating rhythm for our top accounts: daily hot-account check-ins, the weekly “forest view” review with leadership, and the account list itself with Sales leadership. Goal: zero surprise escalations to our execs. Make the bridges work. Our FDE team connects to SA and Sales, Product, engineering (inference, infra), capacity and on-call. You’ll make sure each connection has a clear owner, cadence and SLA, with no hand-offs falling through the cracks:Account transitions between solution architect and FDE, with exit criteria and runbooksNon-P0 escalations to engineering teams, tracked and burned down weeklyCustomer patterns and gaps flowing into the product roadmapDrive cross-team programs for our largest customers. Coordinate multi-team efforts such as dedicated-capacity rollouts, cluster migrations, capacity reservations and large customer launches. Bring together various teams so these run on a plan, not on heroics. Reduce toil and protect platform time. Track where engineering time goes: incidents another team owns, manual routing and config changes, after-hours pages. Work with engineering leads to remove the biggest sources of obstacles, so FDEs keep 30% of their time for shaping the platform. Own the metrics. Build and report the metrics scorecard (account health, response times, toil, load per engineer, team health) to leadership. Help us scale the team. Drive programs like new-hire enablement and certification, account load balancing, and run book coverage. Partner with Recruiting on hiring operations as we grow. Manage risk and dependencies. Maintain a clear-eyed view of cross-team dependencies and risks; surface them.