--- title: 'Manager, Solutions Architect at Baseten' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/manager-solutions-architect-baseten-san-francisco-tyxawgvrzr1j' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-08' --- # Manager, Solutions Architect at Baseten - **Company:** [Baseten](https://feeny.ai/companies/baseten) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $165k–$330k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-11-04 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-08 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/baseten/1532aa00-5a93-4967-bb24-6561495d9605/application **Skills:** Solution Architecture, Machine Learning, Generative AI, LLM Deployment, Inference Optimization, Technical Scoping, Prototyping, Software Engineering, vllm, sglang, TRT-LMM, ML Inference Benchmarks, GPU Selection, Latency Tuning, Cloud Infrastructure > Lead and mentor a team of Solution Architects to partner with Sales and customers in translating business needs into technical solutions. The role involves hands-on technical ownership, driving POCs, and optimizing AI applications on the Baseten platform. ## 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 Manager (Player & Coach) of the Solution Architect team, you will lead and mentor a team of Solution Architects who will partner closely with Sales and customers to translate business needs into technical solutions, run technical discovery, and guide repeatable deployments and proofs of value for customers. Applying both hands-on technical ownership and managerial leadership, you will guide your team through the processes of owning discovery calls, demos, technical scoping and driving POCs through to execution as well as designing, deploying, and managing high performance, low latency AI applications on Baseten’s platform. You will also partner with product, infrastructure, and other customer engineering teams to ensure that large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI systems deliver best-in-class performance, reliability, and cost efficiency in production environments. ## 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 Leadership - Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Solution Architects, providing guidance on technical direction, project execution, and professional development. - Set clear goals and ensure timely, high-quality delivery across multiple customer-facing projects involving LLM deployment and inference optimization. - Collaborate with leadership to align team priorities with company and customer goals, balancing short-term delivery, widely varying customer priorities, and long-term technical initiatives. - Player-coach – While much of this role will be leading the team, you will also be expected to be a key driver on strategic product initiatives and customer engagements. The best managers derive credibility from being able to be hands-on when needed. Team Management - Lead a team of Solution Architects who will: - Partner with sales on customer discovery calls (most often second calls, occasionally first calls for large accounts). - Lead demos and technical scoping to align on success criteria, architecture, and deployment approach. - Own benchmarking and repeatable deployments, including handling standard deployment patterns and configurations across many modalities – LLMs, embeddings, image and video generation, VoiceAI, etc. - Advising on tradeoffs like H100s vs B200s and latency-optimized vs throughput-optimized setups. - Driving consistent “playbook” style deployments for common models and use cases. - Become a power user of different runtimes such as vLLM, SGLang, and TRT-LLM and all the common configurations and tradeoffs between them - Drive POC and project execution, including: - Scoping POCs and keeping stakeholders aligned on timeline, deliverables, and next steps. - Acting as the “ringleader” or project manager for POCs. - Pulling in Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) support when deeper or more complex technical work is needed. ## REQUIREMENTS - AI/ML background and the ability to credibly discuss AI/ML topics with technical stakeholders. - 4+ years of professional Solution Architecture/Solutions Engineering experience, including 1+ year in a leadership or mentorship capacity. - Strong customer-facing communication skills, including the ability to run structured discovery and clarify ambiguous requirements. - Technical depth to scope solutions, without needing to write production code. - Ability to script and prototype as needed, including comfort “vibe coding” to move quickly in technical workflows. ## NICE TO HAVE - Experience running or supporting benchmarks for ML inference deployments. - Familiarity with infrastructure tradeoffs relevant to inference performance and cost (for example GPU selection and latency versus throughput tuning). - Experience serving as a cross-functional technical lead for customer POCs, including coordination across Sales and Engineering. - Professional Software engineering experience ## BENEFITS - Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity - (U.S. only) 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 - (U.S. only) 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 - [Engineering Manager, Site Reliability Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-site-reliability-engineering-baseten-london-677svqj2757z) — London, United Kingdom - [Product Finance](https://feeny.ai/job/product-finance-baseten-san-francisco-gebqez03ewq1) — San Francisco, CA - [Deal Strategy](https://feeny.ai/job/deal-strategy-baseten-san-francisco-t915bf08pg17) — San Francisco, CA - [Recruiting Operations Specialist](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-operations-specialist-baseten-san-francisco-zm2cq8041gzn) — San Francisco, CA - [Technical Product Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-product-marketing-manager-baseten-san-francisco-r68c2ev79k0h) — San Francisco, CA - [Software Engineer - Storage Systems (Agent Infra)](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-storage-systems-agent-infra-baseten-san-francisco-kzp8s7crqzqd) — San Francisco, CA - [Software Engineer - Networking (Agent Infra)](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-networking-agent-infra-baseten-san-francisco-sv41mcqejb10) — San Francisco, CA - [Software Engineer - Compute & Isolation](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-compute-isolation-baseten-san-francisco-4zeeahr0yxfe) — San Francisco, CA - [Solutions Architect, EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-architect-emea-baseten-7wm26ab3zv3k) - [Strategic Compute Investments](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-compute-investments-baseten-san-francisco-21bc8fbgrxt9) — San Francisco, CA