--- title: 'Technical Program Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering at Baseten' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-forward-deployed-engineering-baseten-san-francisco-gqfvtepze64h' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-25' --- # Technical Program Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering at Baseten - **Company:** [Baseten](https://feeny.ai/companies/baseten) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $165k–$330k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-10-22 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-25 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/baseten/976f89ef-1065-45a7-8b51-31fecd1ef1e6 ## 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 Forward Deployed Engineering is Baseten’s swat team. We’re deeply technical, great with customers and fast, and we make the platform better with everything we learn in the field. FDEs take on the hardest inference problems for our most strategic customers: novel architectures, extreme scale, tight latency budgets. Then we turn those solutions into a platform no one can match. We’re scaling the team quickly. We need someone to build the operating system that lets a fast-growing team of engineers stay focused on hard problems instead of coordination. This is a high-visibility role with direct exposure to our largest customers and to company leadership. You’ll shape how a new kind of engineering team operates in the AI industry. ## RESPONSIBILITIES - Run the priority account cadence. Own the operating rhythm for our top accounts: daily hot-account check-ins, the weekly “forest view” review with leadership, and the account list itself with Sales leadership. Goal: zero surprise escalations to our execs. - Make the bridges work. Our FDE team connects to SA and Sales, Product, engineering (inference, infra), capacity and on-call. You’ll make sure each connection has a clear owner, cadence and SLA, with no hand-offs falling through the cracks: - Account transitions between solution architect and FDE, with exit criteria and runbooks - Non-P0 escalations to engineering teams, tracked and burned down weekly - Customer patterns and gaps flowing into the product roadmap - Drive cross-team programs for our largest customers. Coordinate multi-team efforts such as dedicated-capacity rollouts, cluster migrations, capacity reservations and large customer launches. Bring together various teams so these run on a plan, not on heroics. - Reduce toil and protect platform time. Track where engineering time goes: incidents another team owns, manual routing and config changes, after-hours pages. Work with engineering leads to remove the biggest sources of obstacles, so FDEs keep 30% of their time for shaping the platform. - Own the metrics. Build and report the metrics scorecard (account health, response times, toil, load per engineer, team health) to leadership. - Help us scale the team. Drive programs like new-hire enablement and certification, account load balancing, and run book coverage. Partner with Recruiting on hiring operations as we grow. - Manage risk and dependencies. Maintain a clear-eyed view of cross-team dependencies and risks; surface them early, drive mitigation, and keep leadership informed with honest, signal-rich updates. - Communicate up, down, and across. Translate between deeply technical teams and senior leadership. Run effective program reviews and write the kind of crisp statuses that let busy people make fast decisions. ## REQUIREMENTS - 5+ years as a TPM (or engineer turned TPM) on infrastructure, cloud or customer-facing technical programs - Technical depth: you’re comfortable with ML Infra systems, Kubernetes, GPUs and distributed systems, and can follow an incident channel or a design doc without a translator. Experience with LLM inference is a strong plus. - You’ve run programs across many teams at once and kept them moving without formal authority - Calm in the middle of an escalation: you bring structure to chaos and close the loop - You write clearly and concisely, for engineers and for execs - High ownership, and you’d rather fix the process than work around it ## NICE-TO-HAVES - Experience working on AI / ML Infra stack. - Background in solutions engineering, SRE or forward-deployed teams ## WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE - In your first few months, you'll have taken ownership of one or more in-flight programs, established the operating rhythm they were missing, and built the trust that makes teams want you in the room. - Within a year, the programs you run are the ones leadership doesn't worry about, because the structure is clear, the risks are visible early, and the follow-ups always close. ## 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 - [Strategic Compute Investments](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-compute-investments-baseten-san-francisco-21bc8fbgrxt9) — San Francisco, CA - [Global Equity Programs Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/global-equity-programs-lead-baseten-san-francisco-amsf677xyj3z) — San Francisco, CA - [Product Platform - Backend Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/product-platform-backend-engineer-baseten-san-francisco-mfskrsq5930d) — San Francisco, CA - [Software Engineer - Partner Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-partner-platform-baseten-san-francisco-fqsvwxesrbwy) — San Francisco, CA - [Software Engineer - Billing & Internal Tooling](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-billing-internal-tooling-baseten-san-francisco-sw5zf1a8c1kw) — San Francisco, CA - [Software Engineer - Identity & Authorization](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-identity-authorization-baseten-san-francisco-vzsj22ypnnxp) — San Francisco, CA - [Product Platform - Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/product-platform-product-engineer-baseten-san-francisco-q1x61pzxee69) — San Francisco, CA - [IT Systems Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/it-systems-engineer-baseten-remote-gttf6m9snhe3) - [Product Marketing Manager, Partnerships](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-manager-partnerships-baseten-san-francisco-nq8djv2cchyf) — San Francisco, CA - [Partner Enablement Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/partner-enablement-lead-baseten-san-francisco-hnn1ex9bg330) — San Francisco, CA