Forward Deployed Engineer, Strategic Inference

About the role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) focused on Inference, you will be a hands-on technical partner to our most strategic customers - production AI teams looking to leverage high quality models and do inference at scale. For us, FDE is not a replacement for a Solutions Architect; you will partner with our SAs as a deep-domain specialist in inference optimization, fine-tuning pipelines, and production deployment.

As key contributors to both the CX, Engineering, and Sales organizations, FDEs add tremendous value by ensuring we can meet the requirements of our most complex POCs, facilitate successful platform adoption, and guide tailored optimization efforts - directly impacting customer success, company growth, and the hardening of our core platform.

Responsibilities

• Inference Engine Optimization: Select, configure, and optimize inference engine based on hardware, model architecture, and workload profile
• Configuration & Performance Tuning: Develop configuration updates to win critical POCs, benchmarks, and optimize customer deployments; tune KV cache, apply speculative decoding, determine optimal tensor parallelism, and determine quantization strategy to hit throughput and latency targets.
• Strategic Customer Alignment: Act as the primary technical point of contact for aligned strategic accounts - monitoring and optimizing endpoint configurations, helping customers get the most out of the platform, and collaborating to ensure we hit critical milestones.
• Opinionated Onboarding: Establish direct alignment with strategic customers at onboarding; ensure the right inference configurations are in place from day one to improve time-to-value.
• Product Feedback Loop: Directly influence our software and model roadmap by surfacing insights from the field. Contribute back to the product where needed to support customer requirements or drive a better experience. Drive early feature and research adoption with strategic logos.

Qualifications

• Experience: 5+ years in a technical role, with a strong focus on system optimization. Recent experience in inference systems and open-source LLM deployments.
• Inference Engine Depth: Expert-level, hands-on experience with inference engines (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, SGLang); ability to diagnose and resolve performance issues at the engine level.
• Inference Optimization: Deep knowledge of KV cache tuning, speculative decoding, tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, and quantization techniques
• Model Landscape Awareness: Broad knowledge of state-of-the-art open-source models and strong judgment on model selection for specific customer use cases, hardware profiles, and performance targets.
• Coding Proficiency: Strong Python skills; comfortable working in production environments
• Experience leading complex projects with exceptional project management and communication skills

Compensation

We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance, and other benefits, as well as flexibility in terms of remote work. The US base salary range for this full-time position is: $270,000 - $300,000 OTE + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by location, level and role. Individual compensation will be determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge.

Application Policy

Please read each role carefully and apply to the position best suited to you. Candidates are limited to 6 applications within a 90-day period, and applications beyond that limit will be automatically rejected. You may apply to additional roles 90 days after your last application.