--- title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer at Baseten' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-baseten-san-francisco-h2h8j7pgxpxn' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-06' --- # Forward Deployed Engineer at Baseten - **Company:** [Baseten](https://feeny.ai/companies/baseten) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $165k–$330k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2024-03-28 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/baseten/84c1801c-1a65-49fb-aaaa-beeafd530e7e/application **Skills:** Python, AI/ML pipelines, Machine Learning model development, Software development, Production-level coding, ComfyUI, Docker, API development > Partner with customers to architect, build, and deploy high-scale production AI applications on the Baseten platform. The role involves hands-on coding, software development, and product management tasks, translating ambiguous business goals into reliable, observable services with clear quality, latency, and cost ou... ## Job description ## 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 https://www.baseten.co/blog/announcing-our-series-f/, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn 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 https://www.baseten.co/blog/forward-deployed-engineering/ - The fastest, most accurate Whisper transcription https://www.baseten.co/blog/the-fastest-most-accurate-and-cost-efficient-whisper-transcription/ - Deploy production-ready model servers from Docker images https://www.baseten.co/blog/deploy-production-model-servers-from-docker-images/ - Deploy custom ComfyUI workflows as APIs https://www.baseten.co/blog/deploying-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, implementing, and deploying Baseten solutions end-to-end (problem framing → evaluation → production deployment → monitoring). This involves working with customers’ engineering teams at every stage of the customer journey including: sales, implementation, and expansion. - Deliver with velocity: turn vague objectives into clear specs and well-defined PoCs so we can rapidly ship well-tested services and outcomes for our customers - Optimize and enhance AI/ML projects, contributing to the continuous improvement of our technical stack. This includes developing features and PRDs with other engineering and product orgs. - Own products and customer projects end-to-end, functioning as both an engineer, project manager, and product manager, with a focus on user empathy, project specification, and end-to-end execution. - Navigate ambiguity and exercise good judgment on tradeoffs and tools needed to solve problems, avoiding unnecessary complexity. - Demonstrate pride, ownership, and accountability for your work, expecting the same from your teammates. ## REQUIREMENTS - Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related field. - 2+ years of professional work experience in a fast-paced, high-growth environment. - Demonstrated experience with one or more general-purpose programming languages in a production-level environment, with a strong preference for Python. - Familiarity with AI/ML pipelines and the lifecycle of ML model development and deployment. - Strong communication skills, particularly on complex technical topics. - Experience in building or optimizing AI/ML projects is highly valued. ## BENEFITS - Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity - 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents - Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!) - Paid parental leave - Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot - Company-facilitated 401(k) - Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities. Apply now to embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward-thinking team, we would love to hear from you. At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable). ## About Baseten ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Baseten is an AI infrastructure platform that provides high-performance inference infrastructure for deploying, optimizing, and managing AI models in production. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series F) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2019 - **Founders**: Tuhin Srivastava (CEO), Amir Haghighat (CTO), Phil Howes (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist) ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: AI Infrastructure / Cloud Computing / MLOps - **Target customers**: B2B, targeting AI-native companies, enterprises, and developers building and deploying large-scale AI applications. Notable customers include Abridge, Cursor, Lovable, Notion, and OpenEvidence. - **Mission or purpose statement**: Provide the tooling, expertise, and hardware needed for teams to bring performant AI products to market as quickly and reliably as possible. The company's core belief is that "inference is everything" and that the future of AI will consist of millions of specialized models embedded into every product and workflow. ## Products & Services - **Baseten Cloud**: A fully-managed, global deployment platform for AI models. Provides out-of-the-box performance optimizations, 99.99% uptime, and massive horizontal scale. Supports single-tenant and self-hosted (hybrid) deployments. - **Baseten Inference Stack**: The proprietary, underlying technology that powers the platform. Includes custom model runtimes (LLMs, embeddings, voice AI, image generation), advanced caching, custom kernels, and cutting-edge performance research. Claims 2x higher throughput and 10% lower latency for embeddings (BEI). - **Baseten Chains**: Enables granular hardware and autoscaling for compound AI systems, reportedly powering 6x better GPU usage and cutting latency in half. - **Frontier Gateway (Pre-optimized Model APIs)**: Allows users to instantly test and deploy pre-optimized versions of the latest open-source, custom, and fine-tuned models (e.g., Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM, gpt-oss). - **Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)**: A service offering where Baseten engineers work side-by-side with key customers to build, optimize, and scale their models from prototype to production. - **Training on Baseten**: Allows users to train models and deploy them in one click on the inference-optimized infrastructure. - **Monetization API**: An inference API that allows model developers to monetize their models. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not privately disclosed, but the company has raised a total of **$585M** in funding. - **Key Metric**: Annual revenue of **$7.0M** (as per LinkedIn). Total funding of **$585M**. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: IVP, Spark Capital, Bond, CapitalG, South Park Commons, Greylock. - **Growth Signals**: - Announced a **Series F** funding round (details not fully public in search results). - **Massive headcount growth**: 224.4% year-over-year, now employing 201 people. - **LinkedIn follower growth**: 199.9% year-over-year. - **Active job postings**: 112 open roles. - Acquired the company **Parsed**. - Backed by high-profile institutional investors including CapitalG (Alphabet's growth fund) and IVP. ## Competitive Advantages - **High-Performance Inference Stack**: A proprietary, deeply optimized stack focusing on ultra-low latency and high throughput for the most demanding Gen AI workloads (voice AI, real-time streaming, complex compound AI systems). - **Customer Obsession & Forward Deployed Engineering**: A hands-on, consulting-style approach with their FDE team, which builds deep, sticky relationships with high-value customers like Abridge and Notion. - **Global & Hybrid Cloud Flexibility**: Offers both fully-managed cloud and self-hosted deployments within customer VPCs, providing scalability and security for enterprises with strict data governance requirements. - **Founding Team's Deep Technical Credibility**: Built by former researchers and engineers who experienced the "deployment hell" of AI systems firsthand, giving them deep empathy and expertise in the problem they are solving. ## Strategic Focus - **Dominating the "Inference-as-a-Service" Market**: The company's core thesis is that inference will become the largest market ever created, and they are building the infrastructure to power it. - **Scaling for High-Volume, Mission-Critical Workloads**: Focus on reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency for customers who cannot afford downtime or latency (e.g., AI phone calls, real-time translation). - **Deepening the Technical Stack**: Continuously investing in performance research (custom kernels, new decoding techniques) and expanding capabilities into new areas like voice AI and audio streaming. - **Aggressive Hiring**: With 112 open positions and massive YoY growth, scaling the engineering, sales, and operations teams is a clear priority. ## Why Work Here - **Hard Technical Problems**: Engineers work on the most challenging problems in modern infrastructure—model serving, low-level GPU optimization, networking, distributed systems, and observability. This is a high-agency, high-impact engineering environment. - **High Growth Trajectory**: The company is experiencing explosive growth (224% headcount increase, active hiring). This offers significant career acceleration and ownership opportunities. - **Strong Engineering Culture**: Founded by engineers, for engineers. The culture emphasizes "first-principles thinking across the entire stack" and a "customer-obsessed" mindset. The employer rating on compensation, culture, and work-life balance is rated highly (5.0). - **Top-Tier Team & Investors**: The team has strong talent density with hires from Meta, Stripe, Google, NVIDIA, and Databricks. Being backed by top-tier VCs provides stability and a clear long-term vision. - **Hybrid/In-Office**: Based in San Francisco with a strong in-person or hybrid culture common for fast-moving infrastructure startups. ## Sources 1. [Company Website](https://www.baseten.co/) 2. [Careers Page](https://www.baseten.co/resources/careers/) 3. [About Us (Team)](https://www.baseten.co/about-us/) 4. [LinkedIn Company Profile](https://www.linkedin.com/company/baseten) 5. [Ashby Careers Portal](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/baseten) ## Other roles at Baseten - [Capacity Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/capacity-operations-manager-baseten-san-francisco-y3x505g4b4sp) — San Francisco, CA - [Delivery Director, Capacity Programs](https://feeny.ai/job/delivery-director-capacity-programs-baseten-san-francisco-3atm4mfthp2s) — San Francisco, CA - [Executive Assistant to the Head of Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-assistant-to-the-head-of-marketing-baseten-san-francisco-qs51cj7za0s8) — San Francisco, CA - [Data Scientist (Analytics)](https://feeny.ai/job/data-scientist-analytics-baseten-san-francisco-be5fx1ph9j98) — San Francisco, CA - [Marketing Analytics Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-analytics-manager-baseten-san-francisco-4p2rq2tkthpv) — San Francisco, CA - [Software Engineer - Identity and Authorization](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-identity-and-authorization-baseten-san-francisco-m144rq5swsse) — San Francisco, CA - [Revenue Strategy & Operations, Sr. Analyst](https://feeny.ai/job/revenue-strategy-operations-sr-analyst-baseten-san-francisco-1hdcre602ctw) — San Francisco, CA - [Finance Systems Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/finance-systems-lead-baseten-san-francisco-yjsr6fvstq1z) — San Francisco, CA - [Technical Program Manager, Model Performance](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-model-performance-baseten-san-francisco-hp4h7qz1jc68) — San Francisco, CA - [Executive Assistant to CRO & Head of Strategic Sales](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-assistant-to-cro-head-of-strategic-sales-baseten-san-francisco-phbbeepy736a) — San Francisco, CA