> 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. # Senior/Principal Forward Deployed Engineer - Applied AI/ML Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/abf1cdea6984147c Luminary posts a senior FDE role to build what the customer runs in San Mateo, CA with no pay posted. Develop and deploy Physics AI models for customer engineering problems, spanning architecture selection, training, evaluation, and production operationalization. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026. - [Luminary](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/luminary) First seen Oct 24, 2026 · open on Rippling as of Nov 8, 2026 Pay not posted San Mateo, CA On-site Full-time Develop and deploy Physics AI models for customer engineering problems, spanning architecture selection, training, evaluation, and production operationalization. - [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2Fabf1cdea6984147c&placement=top) - [View posting at Luminary](https://ats.rippling.com/luminarycloud/jobs/c2b9847d-186c-4675-a32f-1a9ef7d478b4) 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 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 (not covered) Travel **Required, amount not stated** - **Coding**: Writes production code - **Builds for**: External customers - **Level**: Senior - **Role**: Individual contributor ### What they ask for Experience - **5+ years** Applied machine learning experience - **10+ years** Applied machine learning experience ### 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 Mateo, 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 Mateo, CA - **Work arrangement**: On-site - **Employment type**: Full-time - **Travel**: Travel required, amount not stated ## More like this [Syntiant](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/syntiant) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/e0bcf35f10ba6dd1) Redwood City, CA New · 4d ago $195,000–$225,000 [Sieve](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/sieve) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer, Physical AI](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/c01d9e4502e1f4bf) San Francisco, CA On-site 5mo ago $150,000–$350,000 [Periodic Labs](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/periodic-labs) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer, Physics & Simulation](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/f51097ef995e7154) Menlo Park, CA On-site 5mo ago $250,000–$350,000 - [Other jobs at Luminary (6)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/luminary) ## The job description from Luminary ### JOIN THE REVOLUTION IN ENGINEERING INNOVATION Luminary helps engineering companies be more competitive by getting to market faster, creating better products, and reducing development risk. We do this through our Physics AI platform — the fastest and easiest way to build and deploy models that understand and instantly predict physical reality with precision. Our customers span industries from automotive and aerospace to defense, industrial, semiconductors, and energy — ranging from hyper-growth startups to Fortune 100 enterprises. Luminary is a Series B company headquartered in San Mateo, California. ### YOUR IMPACT As a Senior/Principal Applied AI/ML Scientist on Luminary's Applied AI/ML team, you build the Physics AI models that power customer outcomes. You work in a matrix structure inside customer value delivery teams alongside a Lead Delivery Engineer, Applications Engineers, and Data & Platform engineers. You take real customer engineering problems, design and train the right model architectures, and partner with the team to deploy those models into production engineering workflows. You operate at the boundary of cutting-edge research and applied delivery — staying connected to the frontier of physics-informed ML while making sure your work ships and gets used. ### WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own model development for Physics AI engagements: architecture selection, training pipeline design, hyperparameter tuning, evaluation, and validation against ground-truth simulation. - Work with Applications Engineers to ensure training data is physically meaningful and adequate for the target use case. - Partner with Data & Platform engineers to operationalize training pipelines, model registries, and inference serving. - Collaborate with Luminary Research to apply state-of-the-art techniques — neural operators, diffusion models, geometric deep learning, latent representations — to real customer problems. - Embrace co-engineering: work side-by-side with customer data scientists and engineers, sharing methodology and building model literacy on the customer side. - Bring back signal from delivery into Research and Product, helping shape the next generation of Luminary's Physics AI methods and platform. - Mentor junior team members and contribute to internal best practices for applied physics-informed ML. ### WHAT YOU BRING - 5–10 years of experience in applied machine learning, with significant exposure to scientific computing, engineering simulation, or physics-informed ML. Principal-level candidates trend toward the upper end of the range. - Strong proficiency in Python and PyTorch (or equivalent deep learning framework). You write production-quality ML code, not just research notebooks. - Hands-on experience training and deploying models on engineering or scientific data — surrogate models, neural operators, graph neural networks, diffusion models, or related architectures. - Working knowledge of engineering simulation: CFD, FEA, EM, thermal, or related — enough to collaborate effectively with domain experts and understand what the model needs to learn. - Experience with distributed training, GPU workloads, and modern ML infrastructure (experiment tracking, model registries, inference serving). - Strong scientific mindset: rigorous experimentation, careful evaluation, honest reporting of what works and what does not. - Customer-facing presence; comfortable explaining model architectures and limitations to engineering audiences. - Self-starter mentality, persistent through iteration, willing to travel occasionally to customer sites. ### PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS - Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in Computer Science, Applied Math, Physics, Engineering, or related quantitative discipline. - Published work in physics-informed ML, neural operators, scientific machine learning, or related fields. - Experience with physics-informed AI/ML frameworks (e.g. PhysicsNeMo, JAX-based scientific ML stacks) or foundation model fine-tuning pipelines for scientific data. - Prior experience in applied research roles at engineering, simulation, or scientific computing companies. - Track record of shipping models into production engineering workflows. [View posting at Luminary](https://ats.rippling.com/luminarycloud/jobs/c2b9847d-186c-4675-a32f-1a9ef7d478b4) ## About Luminary Luminary provides a full-stack Physics AI platform that connects engineering data, model development, validation, and production deployment. Series B ## Similar jobs [SF Tensor](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/sf-tensor) ### [Member of Technical Staff, Post-Training & Applied Research](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/790e35ccae399fab) San Francisco, CA On-site 2mo ago $275,000–$315,000 [Meta](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/meta) ### [Partner Engineering GenAI - US](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/c4b55e3690201838) Menlo Park, CA 7w ago $179,000–$250,000 [Fulcrum](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/fulcrum) ### [Forward Deployed AI Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/93c0e9cb9ecf62ba) San Francisco, CA On-site 2mo ago $140,000–$300,000 [Applied Intuition](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/applied-intuition) ### [Forward Deployed Software Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/052b3216757ba0ba) Sunnyvale, CA On-site 1mo ago $130,000–$200,000 [Capgemini](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/capgemini) ### [Capgemini Invent - Senior Consultant, Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/0014ace4470c3ce5) Seattle, WA · New York, NY · +4 more 2mo ago $112,600–$212,700 - [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 Luminary and want this page changed or removed? Email info@nextmove.md and we take it down. Employer postings · [How we read postings](https://nextmove.md/fde/method)