Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) at Voltai (Palo Alto, CA)
Voltai· Palo Alto, CA·
Role details
Job description
This role is on-site in our San Francisco office (Atherton near Palo Alto) or hybrid in our New York City office.
The Role
You'll deliver our AI platform the world's leading semiconductor and consumer electronics companies, and collaborate with them to develop new features. (This is not an exaggeration.)
About Voltai
Voltai is developing models and agents to evaluate, design, and interact with hardware and electronic systems.
The Team We're hackers, researchers, and operators obsessed with building AI for electronic systems and semiconductors. Our team includes former Stanford professors, SAIL researchers, Olympiad medalists, and executives from Synopsys, GlobalFoundries, and Cadence. Despite the name drops, we care far more about execution than titles.
We're backed by Stanford, Sequoia, and leadership at Google, AMD, Broadcom and more. In other words, we have deep, deep access to the industry.
What You'll Do
- Own customer deployments at offices across the SF Bay Area, Cupertino, and Santa Clara.
- Develop features specific to customer workflows and port features from our cloud product to on-prem environments inside some of the most locked-down infrastructure on the planet.
- Manage cloud deployments across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OpenShift: standing them up, keeping them healthy, debugging them when they're not.
- Learn about hardware design. Previous experience is not expected, but you should be eager to familiarize yourself with how hardware is developed at a high-level.
What We're Seeking For
- We care about how you think, not how you keyword-match
- 5+ years in backend engineering, full-stack development, or infrastructure/DevOps: internships and teaching assistantships don't count
- Familiarity with agent development and RAG
- Strong systems design and debugging instincts
- Comfortable with the Docker ecosystem, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP), and IaC tools
- Willingness to travel, mostly in California
Bonus Points For
- On-prem deployment experience in enterprise or air-gapped environments
- Prior field engineering, solutions engineering, or customer-facing technical roles
- Experience in EDA, semiconductor, or hardware-adjacent software environments
Our AI Bullshit Meter
We are very good at catching people who use AI to exaggerate their abilities whether on paper or during interviews. Please don't waste our time.
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Why work at Voltai
- Culture: Emphasizes high-agency, interdisciplinary work at the intersection of AI and physical engineering. The team includes Olympiad medalists and former CTOs – a “smartest in the room” environment.
- Remote/hybrid policy: Fully remote (as indicated on Built In and LinkedIn). Employees work from the United States and Germany.
- Notable perks: Opportunity to work on frontier AI problems with direct impact on the semiconductor industry; access to unrivaled industry partners and compute resources.
- Engineering culture: Heavy focus on research engineering (CUDA, post-training, systems), with open roles for both software and hardware engineers. Emphasis on real-world validation and iterative experimentation.