--- title: 'Distinguished Agent Engineer at fastino.ai' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/distinguished-agent-engineer-fastino-ai-san-francisco-n75e1rst2zfc' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-31' --- # Distinguished Agent Engineer at fastino.ai - **Company:** fastino.ai - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-10-19 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-31 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/fastino-ai/ce153a76-17e1-4d9e-a67c-6ed1b1a07abc ## Job description Distinguished Agent Engineer Full-time | San Francisco ## About Fastino - We're building specialized, efficient language models that beat big general models on the tasks that matter. Our team includes alumni from Google Research, Apple, Stanford, and Cambridge. - Our open source GLiNER models have been downloaded 50M+ times and are used by teams at NVIDIA, Meta, and Airbnb. - We've raised $25M (covered in TechCrunch) from Microsoft, Khosla Ventures, Insight Partners, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, Docker CEO Scott Johnston, and others. ## The Role This is one of our most senior IC engineering role. You'll set the technical direction for how agents get built on Fastino models, write a lot of the core code yourself, and raise the bar for everyone around you. You've built agentic systems that real users depend on, and you have strong opinions about what works. ## What You'll Work On - Design and own the architecture for agentic systems built on Fastino's small, fast models: planning, tool use, memory, and multi-agent orchestration. - Figure out where specialized models beat frontier LLMs inside agent loops, and prove it with benchmarks and real customer workloads. - Build the evals, telemetry, and feedback loops that tell us when agents are getting better (or worse) and why. - Partner with research to turn new model architectures into agent capabilities, and shape what research works on next. - Make agents fast and reliable at scale: low latency inference, high concurrency serving, graceful failure handling. - Drive data and fine-tuning strategy for agent specific tasks like tool calling, extraction, and routing. ## What We're Looking For - 5+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years building with LLMs or ML in production. - A track record of shipping agentic systems that real users rely on, and the scars to prove it. - Deep experience across the stack: prompt and context engineering, tool and API design, vector DBs, Kubernetes, and inference serving. - Strong understanding of model behavior: fine-tuning, evals, failure modes, and latency/cost tradeoffs. - Experience setting technical direction across teams, not just within one project. - You write clearly and make complicated systems feel simple. - Bonus: experience building high concurrency microservices for agent workloads. - Bonus: familiarity with GLiNER or other information extraction architectures. - Bonus: open source contributions, papers, or talks on agents or LLM systems. ## About fastino.ai ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Fastino is an applied research lab that develops specialized small language models and a fine-tuning platform (Pioneer) for enterprise AI workflows. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage; $24.5M total funding) - **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, United States - **Founded**: 2024 - **Founders**: Ash Lewis (CEO) and George Hurn-Maloney (COO) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence / Research Services - **Target customers**: B2B – engineering teams at enterprises needing task-specific AI models (e.g., PII redaction, entity extraction, classification, summarization) - **Mission or purpose**: “Building the future of small language models” – advancing specialized, efficient AI that can be trained and deployed on commodity hardware. ## Products & Services - **[GLiNER / GLiNER2](https://fastino.ai/)**: Open-source, open-vocabulary entity extraction models. Used in production systems serving over 1 billion daily end users. - **[GLiGuard](https://fastino.ai/)**: Lightweight guardrail model for prompt injection, jailbreak attempts, and unsafe content classification. - **[Pioneer](https://fastino.ai/)**: “The first model agent” that automatically retrains baseline open-source small language models on live inference data, improving accuracy over time. Provides fine-tuning, deployment, and adaptive inference without writing code. - **Task-Specific Language Models (TLMs)**: Proprietary small models focused on narrow enterprise tasks such as PII redaction, text-to-JSON extraction, function calling, and text classification. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private) - **Key Metric**: Total Funding – $24.5M - Pre-Seed (Nov 2024): $7.0M led by Insight Partners and M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund) - Seed (May 2025): $17.5M led by Khosla Ventures; also includes investment from Dropbox Ventures (Aug 2025) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Khosla Ventures, M12, Insight Partners, Dropbox Ventures - **Growth Signals**: - 19 employees (+28.6% YoY) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/fastinoai) - Open-source models with 3M+ monthly downloads, 3,200+ GitHub stars, and 1.1B+ end users [fastino.ai](https://fastino.ai/) - Launched Pioneer (agentic fine-tuning platform) in April 2026 [aventure.vc](https://aventure.vc/companies/fastino-palo-alto-ca-us) - Attracting talent from Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and other top AI labs [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/fastinoai) ## Competitive Advantages - **Architecture efficiency**: Models are small enough to be trained on low-end gaming GPUs (total hardware cost <$100k) yet outperform much larger general-purpose LLMs on specific tasks [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/07/fastino-trains-ai-models-on-cheap-gaming-gpus-and-just-raised-17-5m-led-by-khosla/). - **Single-token inference**: Small size allows entire responses to be delivered in milliseconds, enabling real-time use cases. - **Continuous improvement via Pioneer**: The platform retrains deployed models on live production traces, creating a feedback loop that improves accuracy over time – a differentiator from static model offerings. - **Open-source foundation**: GLiNER and GLiNER2 have built a strong developer community and adoption. ## Strategic Focus - **Hiring contrarian researchers**: The company is deliberately recruiting AI researchers who “maybe have a contrarian thought process to how language models are being built right now” – i.e., those not obsessed with scaling to trillion parameters [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/07/fastino-trains-ai-models-on-cheap-gaming-gpus-and-just-raised-17-5m-led-by-khosla/). - **Expanding Pioneer ecosystem**: Making fine-tuning and adaptive inference accessible to any developer without coding, targeting broader enterprise adoption. - **Deepening enterprise sales**: Open positions for Founding Head of Sales and Sales Engineer indicate a push to scale commercial adoption. ## Why Work Here - **Small, focused team** (~15–19 employees) with high ownership and impact – typical for an early-stage startup. - **Cutting-edge research culture**: Engineers and researchers work on novel model architectures, agentic fine-tuning, and efficient AI – not just scaling up existing LLMs. - **Remote-friendly**: Presence in the US (Palo Alto), UK, Germany, and Réunion suggests a distributed team; specific remote/hybrid policy not detailed but likely flexible for the right talent. - **Open source contribution**: Engineers can contribute to widely-used projects (GLiNER, GLiNER2) and see their work used by millions. - **Active job openings** (as of mid-2026): Software Engineer (LLMs), AI Engineer, Sales Engineer, Founding Head of Sales – roles offer opportunity to shape the company’s technical and commercial direction [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/fastino-ai). ## Sources 1. [fastino.ai](https://fastino.ai/) – Official website (products, mission, metrics) 2. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/fastinoai) – LinkedIn company page (headcount, funding, team, locations) 3. [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/07/fastino-trains-ai-models-on-cheap-gaming-gpus-and-just-raised-17-5m-led-by-khosla/) – TechCrunch article on seed funding and model architecture 4. [aventure.vc](https://aventure.vc/companies/fastino-palo-alto-ca-us) – aVenture company research (founding date, funding history, Pioneer launch) 5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/fastino-ai) – Official careers page (open positions) ## Other roles at fastino.ai - [Staff SW Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-sw-engineer-fastino-ai-san-francisco-rxxsvqvhbkm7) — San Francisco, CA - [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-fastino-ai-san-francisco-hhz95e0tx414) — San Francisco, CA - [Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-fastino-ai-san-francisco-ecvgcvs61w7y) — San Francisco, CA