Forward Deployed Engineer
$150,000–$195,000 year
On-sitePalo Alto, California, United States
Job Summary
Own the technical win and POC timeline by running head-to-head bake-offs against leading AI providers, tuning model-to-hardware deployments on B200/B300/GB300 NVL72, and designing reproducible benchmark harnesses for quality-parity evals. Build cost-per-token models, handle enterprise security reviews, and drive account health post-signature through usage reviews and expansion. Translate learnings into reusable benchmark reports, reference architectures, and AE enablement material. Define the Forward Deployed Engineering function from day one while working directly with Sales, co-founders, and the inference team on critical deals.
Required Qualifications
- Customer-facing engineering with an owned technical outcome at an infrastructure or ML platform company
- Strong Python skills
- Dual-audience presence with commercial instinct
- Credible with a skeptical staff engineer
- Clear with a CFO
- Able to tell a technical objection from a procurement one
Desired Qualifications
- Hands-on experience with inference internals: vLLM, SGLang, or TRT-LLM, batching, KV cache math, quantization
- Experience with agentic or coding-assistant workloads at scale
- Prefix-cache-heavy long context workloads
- Diffusion image/video, ASR/TTS, or multi-LoRA serving
- Open-source contributions to vLLM or SGLang
- Deep NVLink/InfiniBand topology knowledge
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