Forward Deployed Engineer, Baseten
Training
$200-400k
+ equity
ML application builder for data scientists
Be an early applicant
ML application builder for data scientists
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$200-400k
+ equity
101-200 employees
Company mission
To make machine learning accessible to every organisation.
Role
Who you are
- Minimum 1-2 years of software engineering experience, shipping and maintaining code in large production systems, ideally with breadth across the stack
- Experience debugging complex production issues - working through logs, metrics, and traces to root-cause problems in unfamiliar systems
- Confidence owning ambiguous technical problems. This includes triaging, making decisions under uncertainty, and knowing when to pull in other engineers who own the underlying systems
- Motivation beyond pure engineering. An interest in wanting to work directly with customers, understand their problems firsthand, and influence the product
- Clear communication on complex technical topics, whether you're talking to a customer's engineers or their leadership
- Genuine curiosity about AI inference and training, and a drive to become an expert in the infrastructure powering it
- Willingness to respond to customers outside regular working hours and participate in an on-call rotation
- Excitement about solving problems for some of the largest and fastest-growing companies in the world running mission-critical AI workloads
- We don't expect any one person to cover all of this - the strongest candidates may spike in one or two of the following:
- Depth in a core infrastructure domain such as storage systems or networking (anywhere from the cloud layer to cluster interconnects like InfiniBand and RoCE)
- Experience operating distributed compute platforms like Kubernetes, Slurm, or Ray, especially for GPU workloads
- A detailed understanding of LLM architectures and modern inference engines like vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or SGLang
- The ability to profile and optimize GPU workloads, in training or serving
- Hands-on experience with post-training techniques like SFT and RL, or a broader deep learning background plus fluency in a tensor computation library like PyTorch or JAX
- Operational depth - running on-call, leading incident response, debugging distributed systems under pressure
What the job involves
- 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 yourself
- Do all of this across multiple accounts at once, sequencing the work, pulling in the right people at the right time, and keeping customers and internal stakeholders aligned on status and risk
Our take
As with its mathematical namesake, Baseten focuses on simplifying the complex. The San Francisco startup focuses on simplifying the integration of artificial intelligence into businesses. The tools that Baseten build demolish the need for businesses to hire specialised engineers, utilising the huge strides in artificial intelligence that we’ve seen in the last few years, all without adding workload to businesses.
With serious funding behind it, Baseten has grown its team by three times year-over-year over the last five years. Specifically, it's hired across engineering and marketing, gaining talent from companies such as GitHub, Google, Uber, Amazon, and Palantir. Part of Baseten's focus is on helping companies implement the tools that they have at their disposal, a long-overlooked aspect of machine learning that many businesses have been eager to champion, but are uncertain about how to actually use.
Simplifying the complex world of artificial intelligence for business is no mean feat, but with hundreds of millions in funding behind it and a $5 billion valuation reported in 2026, the company is well on its way to market domination. What's more, the three founders, who met whilst working as engineers at Gumroad, have a lot of experience in navigating this gap in the market.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Jun 2026
$1.5bn
SERIES F
Jan 2026
$300m
SERIES E
Total funding: $2.1bn
Company benefits
- Remote-first work environment. The Baseten team is welcome to work from wherever they want; fully remote, in our San Francisco office, or a mix of both. Today, our team (including our founding team) is spread across the United States, Canada, and Armenia. We provide a $1,000 stipend for you to make your home-office comfortable and productive
- Regular in-person team summits. We get together as a team three times a year to plan, workshop, and most importantly, get to know each other better
- Unlimited PTO. We ask that everyone take at least 4 weeks of vacation. And we have a company-wide break between Christmas and New Year's Day
- Full healthcare coverage. Medical, dental and vision insurance for you and your family
- Paid parental leave. 16-weeks fully paid parental leave (adoptive and non-birth parents included) and flexibility with schedules while returning to work
- Company-sponsored 401(k) for you to contribute to
- Learning and development budget. We encourage you to take classes, attend conferences, and invest in your craft and we’ll cover expenses to make it happen
Company HQ
Union Square, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Tuhin Srivastava
(Co-Founder)Previously Co-Founder at Shape, Machine Learning at Gumroad and Skulpt.
Amir Haghighat
(Co-Founder)Previously Head of Engineering at Gumroad, Software Engineer at Yelp and Engineering Manager at Clover Health.
Phillip Howes
(Co-Founder)Previously Co-Founder at Shape, Machine Learning Engineer at Gumroad and Research Assistant at the University of Sydney.
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