AI Field Engineer / Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

Location: New York, NY / San Mateo, CA / Remote, USA
Employment Type: Full-time
Experience: 3–10 years
Compensation: $176K–$228K base | $220K–$285K OTE + meaningful equity
Visa: H-1B transfers and TN visas sponsored; O-1 considered case-by-case

About the Role

We’re hiring an AI Field Engineer / Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to join our AI’s high-velocity team

You’ll work directly with ambitious AI-native companies to turn complex AI challenges into production-ready systems. This is a highly hands-on role sitting at the intersection of AI engineering, product, and customer delivery.

You’ll build POCs, MVPs, and production integrations while working directly with customers, account executives, and engineering teams. You’ll also engage with technical and executive stakeholders to discuss architecture, strategy, and business outcomes.

This is not a traditional consulting or solutions role you’ll be hands-on-keyboard, writing code, deploying systems, solving technical problems, and contributing directly to our products and platform.

What You’ll Do

• Work directly with customers to understand their technical and business challenges.
• Design and build POCs, MVPs, and production AI applications.
• Deploy and optimize LLM and generative AI workloads in production.
• Work with open-source models, inference infrastructure, and AI/ML platforms.
• Collaborate with customer engineering teams, account executives, and Fireworks product/engineering teams.
• Translate customer requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Troubleshoot complex AI, infrastructure, and deployment challenges.
• Communicate technical architecture and tradeoffs to both engineers and executive stakeholders.
• Contribute code and product improvements directly to the codebase.
• Turn customer learnings into product feedback and help shape our roadmap.
• Take ownership of projects from initial discovery through production deployment.

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for engineers who combine strong technical depth with excellent customer-facing skills.

You may come from backgrounds such as:

• Forward Deployed Engineer
• AI/ML Engineer
• Applied AI Engineer
• AI Solutions Engineer
• Solutions Architect
• Sales Engineer
• Customer Engineer
• ML/AI Infrastructure Engineer
• Customer Success Engineer with strong technical depth

Required

• 3–10 years of experience in a client-facing technical or AI/ML engineering role.
• Strong Python programming skills.
• Experience building and deploying AI/ML or generative AI applications.
• Experience working with LLMs and/or open-source AI models.
• Ability to work directly with customers and communicate technical concepts clearly.
• Experience building POCs and taking solutions toward production.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to operate effectively in ambiguous environments.
• Willingness to work hands-on across engineering, customer delivery, and product.

Technical Experience

Experience with some of the following is highly relevant:

• Python
• vLLM
• SGLang
• TensorRT-LLM
• Kubernetes
• AWS, Azure, or GCP
• AWS Bedrock / SageMaker
• Azure AI Foundry
• GCP Vertex AI
• LLM fine-tuning, including SFT, DPO, or RFT
• GPU infrastructure
• Model inference and optimization

You do not need experience with every technology listed, but you should have strong fundamentals in AI/ML engineering and be comfortable learning quickly.

Why Join?

• Work directly with cutting-edge AI companies.
• Build real AI systems that move from prototype to production.
• Work across engineering, product, and customer delivery.
• Contribute directly to an AI infrastructure platform.
• Join a highly technical, builder-first team.
• Competitive compensation of $220K–$285K OTE + meaningful equity.
• US visa support including H-1B transfers and TN visas.