---
title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer at fastino.ai'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-fastino-ai-san-francisco-hhz95e0tx414'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-31'
---

# Forward Deployed 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/668bfeb2-fec4-4cc3-8049-6473c127c31a

## Job description

Forward Deployed 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

You'll be the engineer who sits inside our customers' stacks and gets them running in production. If you like hard technical problems and talking to the people who have them, this is for you.

## What You'll Work On

- Embed with customer engineering teams to scope, build, and deploy Fastino models into their production systems.
- Write real code: integrations, data pipelines, eval harnesses, and services that run on customer infra (cloud, VPC, on prem).
- Fine-tune and evaluate models on customer data, and prove they beat the baseline on accuracy, latency, and cost.
- Debug the messy stuff: auth, networking, GPU and inference performance, data quality, weird edge cases.
- Own the technical side of deals from first call through go-live, working closely with our founders and AEs.
- Turn what you build in the field into reusable tools, reference architectures, and SDK improvements.
- Bring customer feedback straight to research and product, and push for what customers actually need.

## What We're Looking For

- BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent experience).
- 3+ years as a software engineer, ideally with some time in a customer facing role (FDE, solutions engineering, consulting, or similar).
- Strong in Python. Comfortable with at least one of TypeScript, Go, or Rust.
- Hands on experience shipping LLM or ML systems to production: APIs, fine-tuning, evals, RAG, or agents.
- Solid with cloud and infra basics: AWS/GCP/Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, networking, and security.
- Clear communicator who can explain tradeoffs to an engineer and a VP in the same meeting.
- Ownership mindset. You'd rather fix it yourself than file a ticket.
- Bonus: experience with GLiNER, NER, or other information extraction models.
- Bonus: early stage startup experience.
- Willing to travel to customer sites as needed.

## 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
- [Distinguished Agent Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/distinguished-agent-engineer-fastino-ai-san-francisco-n75e1rst2zfc) — San Francisco, CA
- [Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-fastino-ai-san-francisco-ecvgcvs61w7y) — San Francisco, CA
- [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-hatch-united-states-fd00njr45hc3) — United States
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