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 to ship AI products. THE ROLE Forward Deployed Engineers work directly with the largest and fastest-growing AI companies in the world, owning their technical outcomes on Baseten and taking on the hardest problems in serving and improving models at scale. The work spans the model lifecycle: inference, post-training, and the systems that tighten the loop between them. Act as each account's de facto CTO on Baseten, with final accountability for how their workloads are designed, run, and scaled. Take customer objectives from vague to shipped: frame the problem, define the spec and success criteria, build the PoC, and carry it through to production quickly, using the right tools for the problem. Design the evals and benchmarks that isolate where quality or performance falls short, then close the gap yourself, whether that means optimizing inference, improving the model through post-training, or reworking the eval itself. Be the first responder to mission-critical failures including triage, owning the fix directly or route to the owning team and stay accountable until it ships. Build internal systems so that each engagement is faster than the last. This includes tooling and automation for eval and deployment infrastructure, and the recipes and reference implementations that make the product more self-serve. Shape the product itself, channeling what your accounts need into the roadmap and shipping fixes and features into Baseten's codebase yourse
Jobs in United States
Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer in San Francisco
15 active opportunities · Updated September 2026
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Explore current forward deployed infrastructure engineer jobs in San Francisco. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.
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 to ship AI products. THE ROLE As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Baseten, you will partner directly with customers to architect, build, and deploy high-scale production AI applications on Baseten’s platform. You’ll own the journey with customers from initial exploration to production deployment, translating ambiguous business goals into reliable, observable services with clear quality, latency, and cost outcomes. This role is a great fit for entrepreneurial engineers who want a front-row view into how modern companies adopt AI at scale and who enjoy working across product, software development, performance engineering, and customer-facing implementations. To be clear, this is an engineering role with hands-on coding and software development that also includes aspects of product management, technical customer success, and pre-sales solution engineering mixed in. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Take a look at these blog posts written by members of our Forward Deployed Engineering team: Forward Deployed Engineering on the frontier of AI The fastest, most accurate Whisper transcription Deploy production-ready model servers from Docker images Deploy custom ComfyUI workflows as APIs RESPONSIBILITIES Develop and maintain software systems and product features using one or more general-purpose programming languages in a production-level environment, with a preference for Python due to its relevance in ML projects. Drive customer impact by designing, implementin
About the Team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with healthcare organizations to deploy production AI systems across clinical, operational, and member-facing workflows. We work at the boundary of customer deployment and core platform development, using customer engagements to define repeatable architectures, evaluations, integrations, and operating standards for complex, regulated healthcare environments. About the Role We are hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to own end-to-end deployments of our models within healthcare organizations, including payers, providers, health systems, and healthcare technology companies. You will lead technical discovery, architecture, implementation, evaluation, productionization, and handoff, translating complex customer workflows, data, infrastructure, and regulatory constraints into production AI systems. You will measure success through production adoption, measurable workflow impact, and evaluation loops that establish customer-specific benchmarks, acceptance criteria, and launch readiness. You’ll collaborate directly with customer technical and operational teams, alongside internal Business, Research, Product, Engineering, and Security partners, to deliver solutions and translate deployment learnings into product improvements. This role owns the technical solution; ownership of the commercial or executive relationship is not required. This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. We offer relocation assistance. Travel up to 50% is required. In this role, you will: Own the technical solution end to end, from customer discovery and workflow scoping through architecture, hands-on implementation, evaluation, production deployment, adoption, and handoff. Partner credibly with customer engineers, operators, and domain experts to frame ambiguous problems, define scope, and translate payer, provider, or health-system workflows into technical requirements and mea
About the team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development. About the Role We are looking for customer-focused software engineers to build effective custom software that leverages OpenAI’s APIs to solve real customer problems. As an FDSWE, you will work with our customers and OpenAI Forward Deployed Engineers to design and implement scalable solutions that solve their most difficult problems. You will design abstractions to solve customer problems, and then use them to scale our speed and quality of delivery across all Forward Deployed engagements. You will collaborate closely with Sales, Solutions Engineering, Solutions Architects, and Customer Success Managers who work on the same account. You will also work with our Research and Applied Product and Engineering teams to provide insightful customer feedback. This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. We offer relocation assistance. Travel up to 50% is required. In this role, you will: Embed deeply with strategic customers to understand their business challenges and technical requirements in detail. Design, architect, and develop full-stack solutions using an experiment-driven, iterative approach. Prepare detailed scopes of work and project plans for both proof-of-concept prototypes and full production deployments. Work hands-on with customers' technical teams as a technical expert and trusted advisor, coding side-by-side to drive projects to completion on their infrastructure. Collaborate with Product, Research and Applied teams to ensure seamless customer experiences, project success and actionable product feedback Contribute to internal knowledge bases, codifying best practices and sharing insights gained from customer engagements to scale the Forward Deployed Engineering function. You’ll thrive in th
$175K – $240K/yr
Who We Are Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together . We're building one place where your knowledge, projects, meetings, and AI tools live side by side, so work is faster, clearer, and less fragmented. Millions of individuals, small teams, and large companies run their work on Notion. Notinos (our employees) are customer zero in bringing this future of work to life. We care about craft, building things that last, and the belief that great work is still fundamentally human. Our goal isn’t to ship the next feature. Each and every team of Notinos is working to set the standard for how humans work together in the AI era. From building a business’s system of record to making and managing AI agents to automating away the busy work, we care deeply about giving our customers more time for their life’s work. About The Role As a Forward Deployed Engineer on Notion’s Services team, you will lead the hands on technical delivery of our most complex customer engagements. You will design, build, and deploy production ready solutions that help enterprise customers integrate Notion as the operating layer for their business. You’ll embed with enterprise customers to design and build solutions that integrate Notion deeply into their technical and operational environments. This includes writing and maintaining custom code, designing and deploying production-grade custom agents and AI workflows with MCP, Agent APIs, and Notion’s automation and execution infrastructure, building data pipelines and resolving complex challenges around scale, permissions, and governance. You’ll embed with enterprise customers to design and build solutions that integrate Notion deeply into their technical and operational environments. This is a customer-facing engineering role for someone who is comfortable writing code, debugging technical issues, explaining tradeoffs to stakeholders, and turning ambiguous customer problems into scalable technical solutions. Your work w
$2.6M – $2.9M/yr
Who Are We? Postman is the world’s leading API platform, used by more than 45 million+ developers and 500,000 organizations, including 98% of the Fortune 500. Postman is helping developers and professionals across the globe build the API-first world by simplifying each step of the API lifecycle and streamlining collaboration—enabling users to create better APIs, faster. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Boston, New York, Austin, Tokyo, London, and Bangalore - where Postman was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Battery Ventures, BOND, Coatue, CRV, Insight Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at postman.com or connect with Postman on X via @getpostman. P.S: We highly recommend reading The "API-First World" graphic novel to understand the bigger picture and our vision at Postman. The Opportunity The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team tackles some of Postman's most strategic technical challenges. We partner directly with enterprise customers to solve problems that don't fit neatly into existing product boundaries, building production-grade solutions that often become core product capabilities. As a Sr. Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll operate at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer success. You'll deploy Postman's critical infrastructure into customer environments, solve complex distributed systems challenges, and build the enterprise foundations that enable customers to safely adopt AI at scale. This isn't consulting or professional services. You're an engineer building production systems alongside customers, turning real-world deployments into durable platform capabilities used by thousands of organizations. This team will build 0-to-1 products from scratch - innovative, strategic initiatives designed to unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue. If you enjoy difficult engineering problems, working directly with customers, and building products from the field
From $2.4M/yr
Datadog's Forward Deployed Engineering function is in an active growth phase, and the FDE Lead will play a central role in shaping what comes next. Working in close partnership with the Head of Datadog for Startups and Forward Deployed Engineers, and the existing FDE team, you will help define and expand the FDE framework, build out the structures and processes that allow the team to operate at scale, and extend the program's reach well beyond any single customer segment. This role sits at the rare intersection of sales, execution, program design, and hands-on engineering leadership. You are part field technical leader, part program architect, and part cross-functional connector. You will help determine what the FDE motion looks like at Datadog, contribute to its playbook, and push the boundaries of what the team can deliver. At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships and collaboration it builds, and the creativity it brings to the table. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our Datadogs can create a work-life harmony that best fits them. What You’ll Do: Evolve and scale the FDE operating model end to end: engagement intake, scoping, sprint delivery, handoff back to account teams, and the success metrics (time-to-value, adoption lift, ARR influence, NPS) and reporting infrastructure that support them. Build out a catalog of FDE offerings spanning observability quickstarts, custom integration development, LLM/AI observability accelerators, CI/CD pipeline instrumentation, and cost optimization deep dives, and contribute to their pricing and business models, including free-to-paid conversion plays, paid deployment packages, and post-deployment success motions. Capture product and feature gaps uncovered during deployments, translate them into structured prioritized briefs, and partner with PM and Engineering to strengthen the field-feedback channel that informs roadmap decisions on a regular cadence. Hire, onboard, an
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 to ship AI products. THE ROLE As an Engineering Manager (Player & Coach), you will lead and mentor a team of Forward Deployed Engineers focused on building, scaling, and optimizing LLM inference workloads for Baseten customers. Applying both hands-on technical ownership and managerial leadership, you will guide your team through the processes of designing, deploying, and managing high performance, low latency AI applications on Baseten’s platform. FDE at Baseten is not a sales function – we are a mix of engineering, product, and customer architects who contribute to the core Baseten codebase, drive large portions of our feature roadmap, and execute on complicated customer engagements. You will also partner with product, infrastructure, and other customer engineering teams to ensure that large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI systems deliver best-in-class performance, reliability, and cost efficiency in production environments. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Take a look at these blog posts written by members of our Forward Deployed Engineering team: Forward Deployed Engineering on the frontier of AI The fastest, most accurate Whisper transcription Deploy production-ready model servers from Docker images Deploy custom ComfyUI workflows as APIs RESPONSIBILITIES Leadership & Team Management Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Forward Deployed Engineers, providing guidance on technical direction, project execution, and professional deve
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 to ship AI products. THE ROLE As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Baseten, you will partner directly with customers to architect, build, and deploy high-scale production AI applications on Baseten’s platform. You’ll own the journey with customers from initial exploration to production deployment, translating ambiguous business goals into reliable, observable services with clear quality, latency, and cost outcomes. This role is a great fit for entrepreneurial engineers who want a front-row view into how modern companies adopt AI at scale and who enjoy working across product, software development, performance engineering, and customer-facing implementations. To be clear, this is an engineering role with hands-on coding and software development that also includes aspects of product management, technical customer success, and pre-sales solution engineering mixed in. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Take a look at these blog posts written by members of our Forward Deployed Engineering team: Forward Deployed Engineering on the frontier of AI The fastest, most accurate Whisper transcription Deploy production-ready model servers from Docker images Deploy custom ComfyUI workflows as APIs RESPONSIBILITIES Develop and maintain software systems and product features using one or more general-purpose programming languages in a production-level environment, with a preference for Python due to its relevance in ML projects. Drive customer impact by designing, implementin
From $200K/yr
The Datadog for Startups (DDFS) program helps the next generation of fast-scaling companies adopt best-in-class observability and security from day one. We're looking for the technical engine of this program - someone who can sit across from a startup CTO, earn credibility in the first five minutes, and help them see how Datadog fits into their stack before they've even finished describing it. You'll be the first technical member on a lean, five-person team, owning the technical motion end-to-end: discovery calls, demos, startup enablement, forward-deployed engineering projects, and representing Datadog at founder events across San Francisco. This isn't a traditional SE seat - it's part solutions architect, part technical consultant, part startup evangelist, and it requires someone adaptable, proactive, and ready to take initiative without being told what to do next. At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships and collaboration it builds, and the creativity it brings to the table. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our Datadogs can create a work-life harmony that best fits them. What You'll Do: Run discovery calls with startup CTOs and engineering leads to identify quick wins, validate technical needs, and position Datadog against alternatives like Grafana, New Relic, Sentry, and Clickhouse Deliver tailored Datadog demos and help startups get instrumented quickly - removing friction, showcasing value, and ensuring smooth technical onboarding, particularly around AI/ML observability, infrastructure scaling, and security Build automation to improve internal team workflows - EX: outreach, reporting, the application process, and website updates Represent Datadog for Startups at accelerator demo days, hackathons, conferences, founder dinners, and workshops across San Francisco Build relationships across SF's startup ecosystem - founders, VCs, accelerator partners, and technical communities - and develop thought leadership content for tech
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 to ship AI products. THE ROLE As a Site Reliability Engineer at Baseten, you'll define and codify the gold standards of day 2 operations for our ML infrastructure platform. You'll envision and build robust systems, processes, automations, and observability tooling that keep our platform reliable at scale — and that empower the broader organization to operate confidently. You'll work closely with engineering, forward-deployed and product teams: learning from recurring failure patterns, turning tribal knowledge into automated mitigations, and raising the operational floor for the entire company. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES You'll work on projects like these as part of the SRE team: Improve Baseten SRE Practices, by instrumenting SLOs and SLIs, improving alerting and observability for all services. Building AI-assisted tooling for incident triage and response. RESPONSIBILITIES Own the reliability of Baseten's multi-cloud Kubernetes infrastructure, including incident response, post-mortems, and remediation tracking. Build and maintain observability infrastructure — metrics, logging, dashboards, and alerting — as code. Author, validate, and improve runbooks for recurring failure patterns, ensuring they're structured for low-context, safe execution. Identify high-frequency failure patterns and convert them into automated mitigations or self-healing automations. Diagnose and resolve runtime issues related to latency, memory behavior, GPU utilization, con
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 to ship AI products. THE ROLE As a Product Engineer on the Dedicated Inference team, you'll shape the state-of-the-art developer experience for deploying and operating AI workloads in production. From the CLI and SDKs to APIs, observability, and debugging workflows, you'll build the tools customers rely on every day to manage mission-critical inference deployments. Few teams at Baseten have as much breadth and visibility as Dedicated Inference. The team is often at the forefront of new product development, giving engineers the opportunity to shape the experience of some of our most important customers. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES You'll get to work on these types of projects as part of our Dedicated Inference team: Chains for multi-component workflows Asynchronous inference Model APIs for frontier models Model training built for production inference RESPONSIBILITIES Implement new features and products for the team Design ergonomic APIs and abstractions to solve customer problems Fix bugs and resolve customer issues with urgency Work across the stack - regardless of where you start, you’ll end up touching both React Components and Kubernetes Pods Work closely with the product and forward deployed engineering teams to develop and drive new product ideas REQUIREMENTS Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or related field Proficient coding abilities in one or more popular programming or scripting languages; Python, Go, or Javascript proficie
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 to ship AI products. THE ROLE: Voice is becoming the internet’s next interface, but a production-grade Voice AI system is "hard to build" . You’ll join a small founding team of Baseten Voice AI, focused on bringing state-of-the-art open source models into production for Voice AI customers across productivity, customer service, clinical conversation, creator tools, education, and more. You’ll make a meaningful impact on people’s daily lives and help reshape these industries. This is a high-impact, high-ownership role. You will be the primary owner of Baseten Voice AI - our in-house inference stack to power Voice AI models - from product roadmap through engineering implementation. You’ll partner closely with Forward Deployed Engineers, Model Performance Engineers, and sister engineering teams to push the boundaries of Voice AI. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES: Develop world-class model serving stack for state-of-the-art open-source voice models - reduce end-to-end and tail latency (p95/p99), increase throughput, and improve GPU efficiency via profiling, runtime tuning, and server-level optimizations. Build large-scale, real-time infrastructure for multi-model voice agents - orchestrate STT, TTS, and agent components with streaming I/O to meet customer SLOs. Design tight training and inference iteration loops for voice model customization - enable fast evaluation, safe rollout, and rapid experimentation for custom voice model development. Past projects:
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 to ship AI products. THE ROLE: As a Software Engineer at Baseten, you will own one of the most critical surfaces of our business: pricing, billing, and revenue infrastructure. As we launch more and more products— billing is no longer just operational plumbing. It is a strategic lever for growth. This role will establish clear ownership of billing as a function and create leverage for Finance, Sales, and GTM teams while maintaining a seamless customer experience. RESPONSIBILITIES: Own Baseten’s end-to-end billing and revenue infrastructure, including pricing, invoicing, metering, and reporting foundations. Build and evolve our billing platform and integrations (including Orb), ensuring correctness, auditability, and a high-trust experience for customers and internal teams. Partner closely with Finance, Sales, GTM, and Forward Deployed Engineering to turn real-world workflows into reliable internal tooling and automation (quoting, approvals, renewals, usage reconciliation, revenue reporting). Design systems that scale with new products, packaging, and go-to-market motions, making billing a strategic lever for growth. Drive reliability and operational excellence for revenue-critical workflows: monitoring, alerting, incident response, backfills, and clear runbooks. Lead from the front on high-impact projects: clarify requirements, propose crisp technical approaches, ship iteratively, and raise the bar on quality and velocity. Debug and resolve
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 to ship AI products. THE ROLE As Manager (Player & Coach) of the Solution Architect team, you will lead and mentor a team of Solution Architects who will partner closely with Sales and customers to translate business needs into technical solutions, run technical discovery, and guide repeatable deployments and proofs of value for customers. Applying both hands-on technical ownership and managerial leadership, you will guide your team through the processes of owning discovery calls, demos, technical scoping and driving POC’s through to execution as well as designing, deploying, and managing high performance, low latency AI applications on Baseten’s platform. You will also partner with product, infrastructure, and other customer engineering teams to ensure that large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI systems deliver best-in-class performance, reliability, and cost efficiency in production environments. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Take a look at these blog posts written by members of our Forward Deployed Engineering team: Forward Deployed Engineering on the frontier of AI The fastest, most accurate Whisper transcription Deploy production-ready model servers from Docker images Deploy custom ComfyUI workflows as APIs RESPONSIBILITIES Leadership Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Solution Architects, providing guidance on technical direction, project execution, and professional development. Set clear goals and ensure timely, high-quality d
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