> 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, Physical AI

Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/c01d9e4502e1f4bf

Sieve posts a FDE role to build what the customer runs in San Francisco, CA, at $150,000–$350,000 base, above the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,864 postings with pay. Translate customer requirements into concrete technical systems. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026.

- [Sieve](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/sieve)

Posted May 13, 2026 by Sieve · open on Ashby as of Nov 8, 2026

**$150,000–$350,000** + equity San Francisco, CA On-site Full-time

Translate customer requirements into concrete technical systems.

- [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2Fc01d9e4502e1f4bf&placement=top)
- [View posting at Sieve](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sieve/d294868e-1b94-425c-934b-b1cf806e05aa/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

$150K–$350K Above the median

Midpoint $250K · median $190K

This job $150K to $350K. 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)

- **Coding**: Writes production code

- **Builds for**: External customers

- **Level**: Senior

- **Role**: Individual contributor

### Do you meet what the posting states?

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

- **Work arrangement**: On-site

- **Employment type**: Full-time

- **Pay**:

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## The job description from Sieve

Posted by Sieve on May 13, 2026

### About Us

Sieve is a multi-modal lab curating the world's highest-quality training datasets — spanning video, audio, images, text, and 3D. We combine exabyte-scale data infrastructure and novel multimodal understanding techniques that push the frontier of foundation models. Video alone makes up 80% of internet traffic, and across modalities, data has become the enabling medium powering creativity, communication, gaming, AR/VR, and robotics. Sieve exists to solve the biggest bottleneck in the growth of these applications: high-quality training data.

We partner with top AI labs and did $XXM last quarter alone, as a team of ~30 people. We also raised our Series A from Tier 1 firms such as Matrix Partners, Swift Ventures, Y Combinator, and AI Grant.

### Why Now

Sieve is one of the most capital-efficient teams in AI — roughly 30 people serving the world's leading AI labs across every major data modality. You'll join early, own problems end-to-end, and watch your work ship directly into the models defining the frontier.

### About the Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Sieve, you’ll work on highly specific dataset problems for frontier AI labs. We're looking for someone with a strong bias to action who likes working closely with customers, untangling messy requirements, and shipping fast.

You’ll work closely with customers and internal teams to understand exactly what data is needed, then turn ambiguous requirements into production systems that can find, generate, filter, transform, evaluate, and package high-quality video datasets at scale.

### Requirements

- Comfortable working directly with customers or external teams to translate ambiguous needs into concrete technical systems
- Strong Python developer with hands-on experience in PyTorch or similar ML frameworks
- Experience building custom algorithms, model workflows, or large-scale data pipelines
- Strong intuition for dataset quality, filtering, labeling, evaluation, and edge cases
- Able to break customer-level goals down into the models, heuristics, infrastructure, and QA steps needed to deliver
- Writes clean, maintainable code and can move quickly without creating brittle systems
- Deep passion for video, media technologies, and frontier AI applications
- Motivated by delivering end-to-end outcomes, not just training models or writing research code
- **Bonus:** Experience with large-scale video, audio, or multimodal data processing
- **Bonus:** Active contributor to open source projects
- **Bonus**: Experience as an early hire at a startup
- In-person at our SF HQ

### Benefits

- 401k + Full Health Insurance
- Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner covered and your choice of snacks
- Ubers covered home

**all roles at Sieve require you to be onsite in San Francisco 5 days per week*

[View posting at Sieve](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sieve/d294868e-1b94-425c-934b-b1cf806e05aa/application)

## About Sieve

Sieve builds exabyte-scale video infrastructure and datasets, supplying high-quality video training data to frontier AI labs, Fortune 100s, and generative AI startups.

Series A · 10–50 people

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- [Compare senior FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/senior)
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