Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, Tenstorrent

$100-500k

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

Senior and Expert level

Austin

San Francisco Bay Area

Toronto

Remote from Canada, US

More information about location

Next-generation computing company building computers for AI

Be an early applicant

Next-generation computing company building computers for AI

1001+ employees

B2BArtificial IntelligenceEnterpriseManufacturingDeep TechMachine Learning

Be an early applicant

$100-500k

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

Senior and Expert level

Austin

San Francisco Bay Area

Toronto

Remote from Canada, US

More information about location

1001+ employees

B2BArtificial IntelligenceEnterpriseManufacturingDeep TechMachine Learning

Company mission

To bring unique solutions to the problems facing AI and machine learning.

Job

Company

Role

Who you are

You understand how accelerator compute, memory, and networking topology constrain AI workloads, and don't treat hardware as a black box
You're an early adopter of AI for your work from coding to building agentic workflows that multiply your impact
You work directly with customers to understand their challenges and provide effective solutions
You are comfortable debugging across the full inference stack: from failing requests, through the serving layer, down to OOMs or kernel dispatch if need be
You bring feedback in the form of pull requests, reproducible code, benchmarks, and telemetry data
Strong software engineering skills with 5+ years of relevant technical experience (e.g. Applied Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, MLOps Engineer, Platform Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, Field Application Engineer)
Experience turning ambiguous customer requirements or issues into verifiable acceptance criteria
Kubernetes and Helm experience at multi-node, HPC, or AI cluster scale
Experience with observability and infrastructure automation, e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry
Experience with LLM inference serving engines and technologies, e.g. vLLM, SGLang, Mooncake, NIM, Dynamo, LMCache

What the job involves

We’re looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer who’s excited to build with the engineers using the AI computers Tenstorrent makes
You will create continuity between customers, engineering, and AI inference service products
This is an engineering role first: you contribute production code, operate deployments, and you can explain a trade-off to customer leadership as clearly as to core engineering teams
This is a high-autonomy role with direct customer impact
What You Will Learn
Where co-design of AI hardware and software translates into unique latency and throughput performance
How to scale disaggregated inference services on Kubernetes while balancing performance, reliability, and tactical tradeoffs
What makes enterprise AI deployments successful: from technical requirements through software delivery, cluster-scale validation, and production ownership
Why customer insights from the field shape the best products
How to build agentic workflows for asymmetric impact

Application process

We welcome candidates at various experience levels for this role. During the interview process, candidates will be assessed for the appropriate level, and offers will align with that level, which may differ from the one in this posting

Our take

Tenstorrent is a US- and Canada-based semiconductor startup specializing in processors for AI workloads. Rather than building gneral-purpose CPUs or GPus, the company develops custom chips and sofrware optimized for running moder AI models. As demand for AI accelerates, and as a global chip shortage reshapes the semiconductor industry, these trends have become strong tailwinds for Tenstorrent.

The company’s unique approach is to build for this future software, which it believes will be written at a higher level. Combining this with conditional computing, Tenstorrent supports a scalable distributed network approach that is analogous to a human brain.

While the market for specialized AI hardware is destined to be gigantic, the company has to compete with a plethora of hopeful startups (as well as major tech companies like NVIDIA and Qualcomm). That said, Tenstorrent boasts an excellent trajectory so far, with its latest moves including unveiling its high-end Wormhole AI processors, and a partnership with LG which will see the development of chips for "Affectionate Intelligence".

Kirsty

Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle

Insights

Top investors

52% employee growth in 12 months

Glassdoor (3.5)

Company

Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)

Dec 2024

$693m

SERIES D

Jun 2024

$300m

LATE VC

Total funding: $1.3bn

Company HQ

Flemingdon Park, Toronto, ON

Leadership

Jim Keller

(CEO)

Previously Senior VP of Silicon Engineering at Intel Corporation, VP of Autopilot Hardware Engineering at Tesla, Corporate VP and Chief Architect at AMD, and VP of Engineering at Apple.

Salary benchmarks

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