> AI agents: this is one page of Nextmove’s FDE site, in Markdown. Nextmove is a job board and free career service for forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Each posting is classified from its text, not its title: the kind of work, how much of it is production code, pre-sales weight, time at customer sites, travel, remote arrangement, level and posted base pay. The site also publishes the aggregates: median pay by level, metro, company and kind of work, and which companies started hiring FDEs each week. Every page under https://nextmove.md/fde is served this way; the index of pages is https://nextmove.md/llms.txt. # Staff Engineer, Applied ML Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/51763d2b43ec8b05 Circuit posts a staff FDE role to build for teams inside the company in Austin, TX with no pay posted. A staff-level applied ML engineer in Product Engineering will build and ship customer-facing ML capabilities, working directly with design customers and Forward Deployed Engineers. Read from the employer’s posting on November 11, 2026. - [Circuit](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/circuit) Posted Nov 10, 2026 by Circuit · open on Lever as of Nov 11, 2026 Pay not posted Austin, TX Hybrid Full-time A staff-level applied ML engineer in Product Engineering will build and ship customer-facing ML capabilities, working directly with design customers and Forward Deployed Engineers. - [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2F51763d2b43ec8b05&placement=top) - [View posting at Circuit](https://jobs.lever.co/getcircuit/13e60426-edcb-4b61-be79-3fc56d8105f8/apply) Free. Upload your resume once, see why each FDE role fits, and get introduced only when you say so. ## At a glance ### Posted base pay Not posted All US FDE postings, 2,427 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $161K to $225K, median $193K. ### Do you meet what the posting states? The job is in Austin, TX. Could you work there? Which of these have you used in production? 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[What postings ask for, by background →](https://nextmove.md/fde/paths) ## Conditions - **Location**: Austin, TX - **Work arrangement**: Hybrid - **Employment type**: Full-time ## More like this [Google](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/google) ### [AI Tooling Technical Solutions Consultant, GSRS Security Systems and Technology](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/b06d4e026bdf987b) Sunnyvale, CA · Austin, TX · +5 more 2w ago $152,000–$221,000 [Salesforce](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/salesforce) ### [Partner Technical Architect - Agentforce](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/0d3316c6c5777485) Chicago, IL · New York, NY · +2 more 5mo ago $172,500–$285,800 [8am (formerly AffiniPay)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/8am-formerly-affinipay) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/853014bed20aee04) Austin, TX New · 5d ago Pay not posted ## The job description from Circuit Posted by Circuit on Nov 10, 2026 ### About Circuit Circuit is the AI execution layer for the physical economy. Industrial and manufacturing enterprises run on expertise: the hard-won knowledge of how complex products are engineered, configured, sold, and supported. That expertise is scarce, slow to transfer, and walking out the door as a generation of experts retires. It lives in PDFs, spreadsheets, and the heads of a few people, and the hardest technical decisions wait on whoever happens to know. Circuit puts expert judgment in everyone's hands. We capture how the best people make critical technical decisions and turn it into agents that do the judgment-heavy work, so anyone, regardless of skill level, can make the right call, from quote to install and support, with the accuracy these environments demand. Circuit is built by operators. Our leadership team has built and scaled real industrial companies, and we are already live in production with category-leading manufacturers. We are not bolting AI onto an old playbook. We are building the layer that runs the last mile of how the physical economy executes. ### The Role As a Staff Engineer, Applied ML at Circuit, you’ll join Product Engineering and build the machine learning capabilities that power our product. You’ll work closely with Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), Product Engineers, and directly with design customers to understand real-world challenges and turn them into robust, scalable solutions. A core part of your role is recognizing where a customer need points to a broader product capability, then building it to work across customers and use cases. This is a hands-on engineering role focused on solving current product and customer problems. You’ll use advances in ML where they help, exercise judgment about what is ready to ship, and own solutions end to end, with attention to accuracy, reliability, latency, and cost. Success means delivering capabilities that make Circuit’s product more useful, reliable, and broadly applicable. You’ll draw primarily on LLMs, alongside traditional NNs and statistical models, choosing and combining approaches based on the problem. Your work will span understanding customer use cases and how users interact with the product, data and process modeling, understanding what exists today and how to build on it, evaluation, production implementation, and, where it pays off, model training and fine-tuning. Most importantly, you’ll work end to end with our design customers, building solutions for them. Beyond individual features, you’ll help build shared capabilities such as Circuit’s evaluation framework, improving how we measure quality and catch regressions across the product. As priorities evolve, you’ll apply your engineering judgment wherever it can make the greatest impact. Product Engineering builds the core platform and works directly with customers and design partners. Our FDE teams own solutions architecture and technical demonstrations. You’ll work alongside them on what gets built, and partner with Core ML engineers when a customer problem calls for deeper work on our document models or the agent loop. Your teammates range from full-stack engineers to applied ML researchers. ### This position is based in Austin, TX, onsite 3 days/week. ### What Is in Production Today Our core product includes a long-running agent loop written in Go. Frontier model APIs drive the loop, while specialized tools handle retrieval, extraction, and agent execution. These tools let us solve industrial problems that general-purpose agent harnesses struggle with. We use a combination of open-source and internally fine-tuned models, particularly vision-language models (VLMs), hosted on KServe. Our customer data includes technical documents, high-resolution blueprints, raster images, vector geometry, CAD, and structured data. ### Key Responsibilities - Work directly with FDEs and design-customers end to end, to build solutions on top of Circuit that solve their challenges - Generalize and package our solutions and methods, and empower FDEs to efficiently deploy them across customers. - Improve our underlying models, harnesses, eval methodologies and more to power our solutions and help solve customer challenges. - Debug production systems including edge cases and failure modes in ML pipelines and retrieval systems. - Build and maintain evaluation systems, including datasets, scoring approaches, and repeatable testing to detect regressions. ### Examples of Work You Could Own - **Build a solution with a design customer. **Work with an FDE and a design customer to turn a judgment-heavy workflow, from quoting a configured product to troubleshooting in the field, into an agent that gets it right. - **Model the customer’s data.** Turn a customer’s spreadsheets, PDFs, and product rules into a data and process model the agent can reason over. - **Generalize it. **Package a solution built for one customer so FDEs can deploy it for the next customer without rebuilding it. - **Evaluate on real data. **Build an evaluation set from messy customer data, measure where the agent gets it wrong, and catch regressions as the product changes. - **Improve retrieval. **Improve retrieval quality, relevance, or latency for a customer-specific use case. - **Debug production. **Trace an edge case in a live customer workflow to root cause with observability tools, and fix it in the product rather than with a one-off patch. ### Experience We want someone who has shipped ML-powered software to production, works well with customers and field teams, and can turn what one customer needs into something every customer can use. Ideally, you have deep expertise and strong technical opinions in at least one of these areas: - Retrieval systems, including embeddings and ranking - Model training and fine-tuning for production, across LLMs, deep learning, or traditional ML - Evaluation design and dataset curation from messy, real-world customer data - Debugging production ML systems with AI observability tools You do not need to be an expert in every area. Strong software engineering fundamentals, good judgment with customers, and the ability to turn one customer’s solution into a product capability matter more than familiarity with our exact stack. Beyond that, we look for: - Strong software engineering background, with a track record of owning and shipping production systems end to end. - Deep experience with data structures and data modeling across relational and graph databases, with strong, well-reasoned opinions on schema design, normalization, and indexing strategy. - Hands-on experience building with LLMs, RAG systems, and agent harnesses, with a solid grounding in how these systems work, fail, and need to be evaluated. - Experience working directly with customers or field teams, turning what you learn into what gets built. - A track record of taking a solution built for one customer and generalizing it so others can deploy it. - Built and maintained features across a multi-service architecture, with strong proficiency in languages like Python and Go. - Daily, fluent use of AI coding tools. You write effective prompts, iterate when output is wrong, and reliably tell working code from code that only looks right. - Bonus: Vision and multimodal models, especially on technical documents (PDFs, CAD) with text, vector geometry, and raster content. - Bonus: Construction, civil engineering, or other industrial domains. - Bonus: Open-source models (Qwen, DeepSeek, or similar), and serving them with vLLM, KServe, or similar. - Bonus: Hands-on PyTorch (or similar) for training and fine-tuning models. ### Human Skills - Ownership mindset with a focus on delivering working systems in production. - Strong product judgment, with an understanding of how system behavior impacts user experience and trust. - Rigorous reviewer of agent instructions, skills, and documentation, ensuring they’re clear, unambiguous, and reliable for agents to act on. - Curiosity about how systems behave in practice and how customers use them. - Bias toward shipping. You take ambiguous problems and drive them to working solutions without needing the path fully defined for you. - Judgment about what is ready to ship, and the willingness to push back to keep the work grounded in customer outcomes. - Clear communicator. You explain ML tradeoffs to FDEs and customers in plain terms, and share progress early. - Critical evaluation of AI output. You spot hallucinated APIs, incorrect logic, and subtle bugs before they reach production. - Systems thinking, including attention to correctness and failure modes. - Low ego, with a focus on team outcomes. ### What We Offer - High-caliber team of seasoned manufacturing and AI leaders - Help create a category-defining platform transforming how manufacturers sell, support, and innovate - Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and employer-paid benefits - Flexible PTO and access to the latest AI tools - A values-driven culture that rewards ownership, curiosity and velocity ### Who Should Apply If you like working directly with customers, turning a judgment-heavy workflow into an agent that gets it right, and then making that solution work for the next customer without starting over, we want to talk. ### Equal-Opportunity Employer We are an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. [View posting at Circuit](https://jobs.lever.co/getcircuit/13e60426-edcb-4b61-be79-3fc56d8105f8/apply) ## Similar jobs [SpaceX](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/spacex) ### [Application Software Engineer, Applied AI](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/e1aaf6465f77494f) Bastrop, TX On-site 3mo ago Pay not posted [Dell Technologies](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/dell-technologies) ### [Agent Ops, Technical Product Management (Forward Deployed Engineer)](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/72cff49f61823c34) Round Rock, TX New · 2d ago Pay not posted [GRIDSIGHT](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/gridsight) ### [Founding Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/198e5509726ce508) San Francisco, CA · Austin, TX · US remote Remote 5w ago Pay not posted [eClerx](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/eclerx) ### [FDE – Security Scan Agent Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/ea80500d05db8126) Austin, TX 2w ago Up to $180,000 [Level](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/level) ### [ Senior Applied AI Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/fe7dfce6c4433d1e) Austin, TX On-site 5mo ago Pay not posted - [Compare US FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary) - [Similar jobs in Austin](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?region=austin) - [Similar jobs that build for teams inside the company](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?role=internal-deployment) Hiring at Circuit and want this page changed or removed? 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