> 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. # Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed Engineer Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/70641fd7886753d9 Inferact posts a FDE role to build what the customer runs, remote, hiring in California, at $200,000–$400,000 base, above the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,864 postings with pay. A hands-on Forward Deployed Engineer works directly with customers to deploy, debug, and optimize vLLM-powered inference systems in production environments. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026. - [Inferact](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/inferact) Posted Oct 2, 2026 by Inferact · open on Ashby as of Nov 8, 2026 **$200,000–$400,000** + equity Remote, hiring in California Full-time A hands-on Forward Deployed Engineer works directly with customers to deploy, debug, and optimize vLLM-powered inference systems in production environments. - [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2F70641fd7886753d9&placement=top) - [View posting at Inferact](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/inferact/b127864f-5c71-4c96-90ce-cb20c57391a9/application) 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 $200K–$400K Above the median Midpoint $300K · median $190K This job $200K to $400K. Senior FDE postings, 1,864 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $160K to $220K, median $190K. ### The work Builds what the customer runs Balance **Mostly building** Project stages 1. Pre-sales (not covered) 2. Proof of concept (not covered) 3. Implementation 4. Operations - **Coding**: Writes production code - **Builds for**: External customers - **Level**: Senior - **Role**: Individual contributor ### What they ask for Visa - **Sponsors visas** ### Do you meet what the posting states? The posting reads as a senior role. What level are you at now? The work is remote from the US. Can you work from the US? Which of these have you used in production? Answer each one. Nothing is saved or sent. [What postings ask for, by background →](https://nextmove.md/fde/paths) ## Conditions - **Location**: San Francisco, CA - **Work arrangement**: Remote - **Remote work restrictions**: Based in San Francisco, California; remote in the US considered for exceptional candidates. - **Employment type**: Full-time - **Visa sponsorship**: Available - **Pay**: ## More like this [Cohere](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/cohere) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer, Inference ](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/23716a9ac7c3670f) San Francisco, CA Remote 11d ago $240,000–$415,000 [NVIDIA](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/nvidia) ### [Senior MLOps Engineer - DSX Enablement](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/d111a9977bdaacbb) Santa Clara, CA · Seattle, WA · US remote Remote 2mo ago $184,000–$356,500 [ServiceNow](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/servicenow) ### [Forward Deployed Solution Engineer – Applied AI FDE](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/1a6269874b4bdbd0) Santa Clara, CA Remote 4w ago $201,300–$352,300 ## The job description from Inferact Posted by Inferact on Oct 2, 2026 ### Overview Inferact's mission is to grow vLLM as the world's AI inference engine and accelerate AI progress by making inference cheaper and faster. Founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM, we sit at the intersection of models and hardware, a position that took years to build. ### About the Role We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to make Inferact successful inside real customer environments. You'll work directly with customers to deploy, integrate, debug, and optimize vLLM-powered inference systems across cloud, Kubernetes, GPU, networking, and model-serving environments. This is a hands-on engineering role, not a traditional pre-sales position. You'll move from architecture discussions to implementation, own difficult production problems end-to-end, and work closely with core product and engineering teams to turn what you learn in the field into reusable product capabilities. Your work will directly affect customer time-to-value and how Inferact's platform evolves. ### Skills and Qualifications Minimum qualifications: - Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, systems, machine learning, or similar. - Strong software engineering ability in Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar, with experience building production-quality integrations, tooling, services, automation, or prototypes. - Hands-on experience deploying or operating ML systems, model serving, AI infrastructure, cloud platforms, Kubernetes, or high-scale backend systems in production. - Ability to work directly with sophisticated customer engineering teams, understand ambiguous technical environments, and personally drive implementations and debugging to resolution. - Strong systems debugging skills across application, runtime, infrastructure, networking, identity, storage, observability, and distributed-system boundaries. - Ability to reason about latency, throughput, batching, model/runtime compatibility, scaling, reliability, and cost tradeoffs in production inference environments. - High ownership and strong technical communication, with the judgment to distinguish one-off customer work from problems that should become reusable product capabilities. Preferred qualifications: - Experience with vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, TGI, Ray Serve, BentoML, or other LLM inference and model-serving systems. - Experience with NVIDIA or AMD GPUs, CUDA / ROCm, GPU scheduling, multi-GPU serving, or accelerator-backed infrastructure. - Experience deploying infrastructure software into enterprise, regulated, security-sensitive, or bring-your-own-cloud environments. - Experience building APIs, SDKs, CLIs, developer tooling, deployment platforms, control planes, or infrastructure products used by technical teams. - Experience profiling latency, throughput, concurrency, GPU utilization, bottlenecks, and performance regressions. Bonus points if you have: - Contributed to open-source ML systems, inference infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, or developer tooling. - Worked in a forward-deployed, customer engineering, field engineering, or highly technical solutions role where you personally wrote and shipped code. - Built deployment playbooks, reference architectures, automation, or tooling that materially reduced customer time-to-production. - Resolved severe customer-facing production issues that crossed multiple technical layers and required close partnership with core engineering. - Turned repeated customer problems into reusable product features, abstractions, documentation, or platform improvements. ### Logistics - **Location: **This role is based in San Francisco, California. Will consider remote in the US for exceptional candidates. - **Compensation: **Depending on background, skills, and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $200,000 - $400,000 USD + equity. - **Visa sponsorship: **We sponsor visas on a case-by-case basis. - **Benefits: **Inferact offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits as well as 401(k) company match. * **Inferact, Inc. is an E-Verify company, and you may review the *** * **Notice of E-Verify Participation*** * ** and the *** * **Right to Work posters in English and Spanish*** * **.*** [View posting at Inferact](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/inferact/b127864f-5c71-4c96-90ce-cb20c57391a9/application) ## Similar jobs [OpenAI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/openai) ### [Applied AI Engineer, Enterprise - EDU](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/4b0baa0ee913def4) New York, NY · San Francisco, CA Remote New · 2d ago $251,000–$278,000 [6sense](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/6sense) ### [Sr. ML Ops Engineer, Forward-Deployed ](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/06ba4bd7675e00f2) San Francisco, CA Remote 12d ago $191,475–$260,830 [Roboflow](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/roboflow) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/d8c0abf8214d490b) New York, NY · San Francisco, CA Remote 5mo ago $180,000–$250,000 [Prime Intellect](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/prime-intellect) ### [Applied Researcher - Forward-Deployed RL](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/0ed15e783d00992e) San Francisco, CA · New York, NY Remote 2w ago $150,000–$300,000 [Databricks](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/databricks) ### [Sr. Forward Deployed Engineer - Public Sector](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/440870dea6def209) Berkeley, CA · Kansas City, MO · +1 more Remote New · 3d ago $182,000–$250,208 - [Compare senior FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/senior) - [Similar jobs in SF Bay Area](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?region=sf-bay-area) - [Similar jobs that build what the customer runs](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?role=builds-for-customers) Hiring at Inferact and want this page changed or removed? 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