> 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. # Forward Deployed Engineer, Strategic Inference Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/861af3d7eac332f8 Together AI posts a FDE role to integrate and configure the product in San Francisco, CA, at $270,000–$300,000 · OTE base, above the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,864 postings with pay. This hands-on inference specialist partners with strategic production AI customers to optimize model serving configurations, meet performance targets, and accelerate platform adoption. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026. - [Together AI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/together-ai) Posted May 7, 2026 by Together AI · open on Greenhouse as of Nov 8, 2026 **$270,000–$300,000 · OTE** + equity San Francisco, CA Full-time This hands-on inference specialist partners with strategic production AI customers to optimize model serving configurations, meet performance targets, and accelerate platform adoption. - [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2F861af3d7eac332f8&placement=top) - [View posting at Together AI](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/togetherai/jobs/5131941007) 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 $270K–$300K Above the median Midpoint $285K · median $190K This job $270K to $300K. Senior FDE postings, 1,864 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $160K to $220K, median $190K. ### The work Integrates and configures it Balance **Mostly building** Project stages 1. Pre-sales (not covered) 2. Proof of concept 3. Implementation 4. Operations - **Coding**: Writes production code - **Builds for**: External customers - **Level**: Senior - **Role**: Technical lead ### What they ask for Experience - **5+ years** technical role ### Do you meet what the posting states? The posting asks for 5+ years. How many do you have? The posting reads as a senior role. What level are you at now? The job is in San Francisco, CA. Could you work there? 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 - **Employment type**: Full-time - **Pay**: ## More like this [NVIDIA](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/nvidia) ### [Senior Solutions Architect, AI Inference](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/d22e034dd514242b) Santa Clara, CA · US remote Remote 2mo ago $184,000–$356,500 [Goodfire AI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/goodfire-ai) ### [Forward Deployed Research Scientist](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/a9ab45854d306c11) San Francisco, CA On-site 2mo ago $220,000–$315,000 [CoreWeave](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/coreweave) ### [Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, AI Agents](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/937cb0d74a7ba1cd) Sunnyvale, CA · San Francisco, CA 3mo ago $182,000–$242,000 - [Other jobs at Together AI (1)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/together-ai) ## The job description from Together AI Posted by Together AI on May 7, 2026 ### About the role As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) focused on Inference, you will be a hands-on technical partner to our most strategic customers — production AI teams looking to leverage high quality models and do inference at scale. For us, FDE is not a replacement for a Solutions Architect; you will partner with our SAs as a deep-domain specialist in inference optimization, fine-tuning pipelines, and production deployment. As key contributors to both the CX, Engineering, and Sales organizations, FDEs add tremendous value by ensuring we can meet the requirements of our most complex POCs, facilitate successful platform adoption, and guide tailored optimization efforts — directly impacting customer success, company growth, and the hardening of our core platform. ### Responsibilities - Inference Engine Optimization: Select, configure, and optimize inference engine based on hardware, model architecture, and workload profile - Configuration & Performance Tuning: Develop configuration updates to win critical POCs, benchmarks, and optimize customer deployments; tune KV cache, apply speculative decoding, determine optimal tensor parallelism, and determine quantization strategy to hit throughput and latency targets. - Strategic Customer Alignment: Act as the primary technical point of contact for aligned strategic accounts — monitoring and optimizing endpoint configurations, helping customers get the most out of the platform, and collaborating to ensure we hit critical milestones. - Opinionated Onboarding: Establish direct alignment with strategic customers at onboarding; ensure the right inference configurations are in place from day one to improve time-to-value. - Product Feedback Loop: Directly influence our software and model roadmap by surfacing insights from the field. Contribute back to the product where needed to support customer requirements or drive a better experience. Drive early feature and research adoption with strategic logos. ### Qualifications - Experience: 5+ years in a technical role, with a strong focus on system optimization. Recent experience in inference systems and open-source LLM deployments. - Inference Engine Depth: Expert-level, hands-on experience with inference engines (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, SGLang); ability to diagnose and resolve performance issues at the engine level. - Inference Optimization: Deep knowledge of KV cache tuning, speculative decoding, tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, and quantization techniques - Model Landscape Awareness: Broad knowledge of state-of-the-art open-source models and strong judgment on model selection for specific customer use cases, hardware profiles, and performance targets. - Coding Proficiency: Strong Python skills; comfortable working in production environments - Experience leading complex projects with exceptional project management and communication skills ### About Together AI Together AI, the AI Native Cloud, is purpose-built for AI engineers. AI application developers get high-performance inference that scales reliably, fine-tuning and reinforcement learning for creating frontier-level specialized models, and pre-training at massive scale for fully custom intelligence, all around a marketplace of leading open models that teams can run, adapt, and own. Trusted by Cursor, Decagon, ElevenLabs, Salesforce, and Zoom, Together serves 400+ trillion tokens a month. ### Compensation We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance, and other benefits, as well as flexibility in terms of remote work. The US base salary range for this full-time position is: $270,000 - $300,000 OTE + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by location, level and role. Individual compensation will be determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge. ### Application Policy Please read each role carefully and apply to the position best suited to you. Candidates are limited to 6 applications within a 90-day period, and applications beyond that limit will be automatically rejected. You may apply to additional roles 90 days after your last application. ### Equal Opportunity Together AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and more. Please see our Privacy Policy at https://www.together.ai/privacy [View posting at Together AI](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/togetherai/jobs/5131941007) ## About Together AI Full-stack AI cloud for developers and enterprises to train, shape, and run open-weight models with research-optimized inference and compute. Series C · 200–500 people ## Similar jobs [Etched](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/etched) ### [Forward Deployment Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/c8747f62aa2ba18a) San Jose, CA On-site 11d ago $208,437–$300,000 [Reducto](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/reducto) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer, Infrastructure Specialist](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/2cd6a2b490a4a574) San Francisco, CA On-site 5mo ago $200,000–$300,000 [Pure Storage](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/pure-storage) ### [Forward Deployed Engineering, Portworx](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/50e89e7f4d1ee762) Santa Clara, CA · Chicago, IL · +1 more On-site 2mo ago $208,000–$305,000 [OpenRouter](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/openrouter) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/59b5f31af1c66ee9) San Francisco, CA Hybrid 5mo ago $220,000–$260,000 [Glean](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/glean) ### [Partner Solutions Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/42c89791e06624ee) San Francisco, CA Hybrid 2mo ago $200,000–$250,000 - [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 integrate and configure the product](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?role=technical-delivery) Hiring at Together AI and want this page changed or removed? 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