Manager of Field Engineering, Fireworks AI
$270-310k
OTE
Offers equity
Generative AI platform enabling rapid scaling for developers and businesses
Be an early applicant
Generative AI platform enabling rapid scaling for developers and businesses
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$270-310k
OTE
Offers equity
101-200 employees
Company mission
To help every organization unleash the full power of artificial intelligence.
Role
Who you are
- You have 8+ years of overall experience, including 2+ years managing Field Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Forward Deployed Engineering, or Pre-Sales teams, with hands-on experience in enterprise software or AI infrastructure
- You have a strong technical foundation and fluency in the LLM stack: inference trade-offs, model serving, fine-tuning workflows (SFT; DPO/RFT a plus), and deploying models on GPU infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP
- You have demonstrated ability to build production software with customers, not just advise on it — you have shipped code running in someone else's production environment and can still do it when a deal demands it
- You have a track record of developing engineers — coaching, giving direct feedback, and growing individual contributors into senior and lead roles
- You have proven your ability to partner effectively with Sales while maintaining technical integrity and customer trust in high-stakes deal environments
- You have strong communication skills — able to run a sharp discovery call, present to a VP or CTO, and debug a latency issue with an ML engineer in the same afternoon
- You have a builder mindset: you thrive in fast-moving, startup environments and enjoy creating structure where little exists
- Willingness to travel (up to ~30%) for customer engagements and team onsites
What the job involves
- We're hiring a Manager, Field Engineering to lead a team of Field Engineers driving technical evaluations and production adoption of Fireworks' inference and fine-tuning platform
- This is a player-coach role — you'll manage and grow a distributed team of hands-on engineers while staying deeply technical yourself, leading engagements end-to-end at some of the most ambitious AI-native companies and enterprises
- As Manager you will be a critical link between the field and the rest of the company: coaching your field engineers in real time, unblocking complex evaluations, and ensuring every customer engagement meets a high technical bar across latency, throughput, cost, security, and scalability
- You'll work closely with regional sales leadership to scale the engagement model, codify the playbook, and build the team
- This is a hands-on leadership role. Your credibility with field engineers comes from having built production AI systems with customers, not just having managed people who did. You will still get in the weeds when the stakes are highest with shipping POCs, performance optimizations, co—lead training engagements with our research team and debugging alongside your team
- Lead, coach, and grow a distributed team of Field Engineers — hiring, onboarding, developing, and holding a high bar for technical excellence and customer outcomes
- Own your team's engagement portfolio: allocate the right engineers to the right pursuits and ensure consistent execution across discovery, demos, POCs, and production integrations
- Lead complex evaluations end-to-end (discovery → architecture → POC → production plan), personally stepping in on the highest-stakes or most technically challenging deals
- Coach AEs and Field Engineers in real time to improve deal quality and close outcomes — reviewing architectures, sitting in on calls, and running sharp post-mortems on wins and losses
- Build and refine the Field Engineering playbook: discovery frameworks, POC templates, reference architectures, and reusable field artifacts
- Serve as the voice of your team and customers internally — systematizing field insights, influencing the product/engineering roadmap, and translating recurring pain points into concrete platform improvements
- Partner with revenue leadership on pipeline health, forecast calls, and territory planning for your region
- Stay hands-on when it matters: build/ship alongside your engineers (POCs/MVPs, load testing, eval + fine-tuning pipelines, model-serving choices across vLLM/SGLang/TensorRT-LLM) and ensure strong post-sales handoffs for onboarding and adoption
- Track and improve your team's operating metrics — win rates and velocity, POC cycle time, utilization, and customer adoption outcomes
- You Excel In These Key Competencies:
- Technical depth with coaching instinct: able to both architect the solution and teach the engineer next to you why it's right
- Operational rigor: able to run a portfolio of concurrent engagements and hit consistent execution across the team
- Deep familiarity with the AI inference, fine-tuning, and production GenAI market and ecosystem
- Sophisticated understanding of enterprise cloud platforms and complex integration environments, with the ability to translate technical architecture into business value
- Strong written and verbal communication — internal docs, exec-ready summaries, and customer-facing technical artifacts that are sharp and clear
- Commercial instincts: able to size opportunities, understand deal dynamics, and align your team's effort to revenue acceleration
- Comfort with ambiguity: creates process where none exists without slowing the team down
Our take
Whilst the development of generative AI is thought to be the reserve of large companies like Open AI, smaller startups such as Firework AI are making this technology easier to access and develop for smaller companies wanting to handle specific business needs using AI. As an open-source model API, it has one of the largest user bases - with over 12,000 users leveraging Fireworks AI’s software.
Though lacking the brand name recognition of generative AI developers like Google and Meta, Fireworks AI differentiates itself in a market crowded with large competitors through its unique approach to deploying its software. It creates smaller, production-grade, customizable generative AI models that can be launched privately and securely, rather than the non-private and inflexible models built by larger companies.
After its 2025 Series C round of $250M, Fireworks AI has been valued at over $4B, an impressive sum for a David in a sea of Goliaths. The company plans to use its funding to reshape AI infrastructure as well as expand globally. It will be interesting to see how the company evolves with its potentially disruptive business approach to generative AI.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Oct 2025
$230m
SERIES C
Jul 2024
$52m
SERIES B
Total funding: $307m
Company HQ
Redwood City, CA
Leadership
Lin Qiao
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously a Senior Director of Engineering at Meta, a Tech Lead at Linkedin, a Research Staff Member at IBM Almaden Research Center and an Advisory Software Engineer at IBM Silicon Valley Lab.
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