> 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 Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/92a4f62e58e7827e Wafer posts a FDE role to build what the customer runs in San Francisco, CA with no pay posted. Own customer deployments from workload benchmark through production, then monitor and improve their ongoing performance. Read from the employer’s posting on November 6, 2026. - [Wafer](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/wafer) Published November 6, 2026 · Updated November 6, 2026 Pay not posted San Francisco, CA On-site Today Own customer deployments from workload benchmark through production, then monitor and improve their ongoing performance. - [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2F92a4f62e58e7827e&placement=top) - [View posting at Wafer](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/wafer/0ca12c04-1f3f-4131-ad38-0c1287be8643/application) Free for you. Upload your resume once, see which FDE postings fit you and why, and get introduced when you say so. We never share your profile with employers without your permission. ## At a glance ### Posted base pay Not posted Typical US FDE pay, the middle 50% of 2,435 postings: $160K to $225K, median $193K. ### The work Builds what the customer runs This posting is new. The rest of the reading appears within a day. ### What they ask for Visa - **Sponsors visas** ### Do you meet what the posting states? 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) ## More like this [Fireworks AI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/fireworks-ai) ### [AI Field Engineer - Enterprise](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/546672abcb710ae7) San Mateo, CA Hybrid 4mo ago $200,000–$260,000 [Inferact](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/inferact) ### [Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/70641fd7886753d9) San Francisco, CA Remote 4w ago $200,000–$400,000 [Baseten](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/baseten) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer (Training)](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/aff80bb0a92dd3dd) San Francisco, CA Hybrid 2mo ago $200,000–$400,000 - [Other jobs at Wafer (1)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/wafer) ## The job description from Wafer Posted by Wafer on Nov 6, 2026 ### Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed At Wafer, we are building AI systems that automatically optimize inference workloads across silicon. Wafer is well funded and serves trillions of tokens a month for mission-critical workloads at fast-growing AI startups. Forward deployed Members of Technical Staff are the engineers our customers work with. You'll take each customer from first benchmark to production, and keep their workloads fast and healthy after that. Our performance engineers and optimization agents do most of the tuning. You make sure it lands for each customer and stays that way. This is its own track, with the same bar as the rest of our technical staff. Sales finds customers and closes them. You are the engineer beside them from the first benchmark onward, not a salesperson. ### What you'll do - Run the technical evaluation on the customer's own workload: understand their traffic and latency targets, run the benchmark and explain the result to their engineers. - Get each customer into production on Wafer, working with our performance engineers and agents to hit their targets. - Own the health of your accounts. Watch latency, errors and usage, catch problems before the customer does, and be who they hear from. - When a problem needs a fix in the engine, the kernels or the agents, scope it and bring the right engineer everything they need to solve it. - Build the tools, integrations and runbooks that make each new deployment faster than the last. - Tell engineering and sales what customers need next, based on what you see in production. ### What we look for - You are a strong engineer who has shipped and operated production systems. You can read a trace, open a profiler and find the problem yourself. - Experience with LLM inference or serving, such as vLLM, SGLang or TensorRT-LLM, is a big plus. - You want to work with customers. You have owned a technical customer relationship and can explain results to a skeptical engineering team. - You are credible in a room full of engineers. You can defend a benchmark methodology and concede the point when they are right. - You work without a spec. The problem arrives half-defined and you come back with a scoped answer rather than a list of questions. ### How we evaluate We score every candidate on seven values: 1. Infinitely Resourceful 2. Exceptionalism 3. Unreasonable Standards 4. Company Over Self 5. High EQ 6. Learns Quickly 7. First Principles Thinker ### Benefits - Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance. - Daily lunch and dinner, unlimited PTO, and parental leave. - $1K/month housing stipend (post-tax) if you live within walking distance (0.5 miles) from the office. - Relocation allowance and benefits. - Covered Uber/Waymo from/to office. - Visa sponsorship available. ### How we work On-site in San Francisco, five days a week. Small team with massive surface area and ownership. You operate with complete autonomy of how to solve problems. Your success is measured by customers who move their production traffic to Wafer and stay because it keeps getting faster. [View posting at Wafer](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/wafer/0ca12c04-1f3f-4131-ad38-0c1287be8643/application) ## About Wafer Continuously optimizes and serves AI inference workloads across models, kernels, serving engines, and accelerator hardware. Series A · 10–50 people ## Similar jobs [Crusoe](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/crusoe) ### [Staff Applied AI Inference Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/f6b6957db986de8d) San Francisco, CA On-site 1mo ago $215,000–$260,000 [NVIDIA](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/nvidia) ### [Solutions Architect, Inference Deployments](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/04939b40f7e54618) Santa Clara, CA 6mo ago $152,000–$241,500 [Novita AI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/novita-ai) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/a87457ee472f5f11) San Mateo, CA On-site 4mo ago Pay not posted [Liquid AI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/liquid-ai) ### [Member of Technical Staff - Post Training, Applied](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/58539013dd9b1dd8) San Francisco, CA Hybrid 9mo ago Pay not posted [Sanas](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/sanas) ### [Member of Technical Staff, LLM Post-Training, Applied](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/24ef7254ad020c1f) Palo Alto, CA On-site 13d ago Pay not posted - [Compare US FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary) - [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 Wafer and want this page changed or removed? Email info@nextmove.md and we take it down. ## Conditions - **Location**: San Francisco, CA - **Work arrangement**: On-site - **Employment type**: Full-time - **Visa sponsorship**: Available Employer postings · [How we read postings](https://nextmove.md/fde/method)