Forward Deployed Engineer

Published October 19, 2026 · Updated October 21, 2026

Pay not postedSan Francisco, CAHybridYesterday

Forward Deployed Engineer embedded with customer engineering teams to ship Fastino language-model solutions into production environments.

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View posting at fastino.ai

At a glance

Posted base pay

Not posted

Median $190K

Typical senior FDE payMiddle 50% of 1,484 postings$160K–$220K

The work

Builds what the customer runs

Balance

Mostly building
Mixed
Mostly pre-sales or support

Project stages

Pre-sales
Proof of concept (not covered)
Implementation
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

3+ yearssoftware engineering

Background

Software engineering

Tools

Python
TypeScript
Go
Rust
Docker
Kubernetes
AWS
RAG
GLiNER
NER

Less common in FDE jobs

Company size: About 1–50 people8%
Company stage: Early12%
Covers pre-sales26%
Hybrid38%

Share of US FDE postings that state each fact.

The job description from fastino.ai

Posted by fastino.ai on Oct 19, 2026

Forward Deployed Engineer

Full-time | San Francisco

About Fastino

We're building specialized, efficient language models that beat big general models on the tasks that matter. Our team includes alumni from Google Research, Apple, Stanford, and Cambridge.
Our open source GLiNER models have been downloaded 50M+ times and are used by teams at NVIDIA, Meta, and Airbnb.
We've raised $25M (covered in TechCrunch) from Microsoft, Khosla Ventures, Insight Partners, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, Docker CEO Scott Johnston, and others.

The Role

You'll be the engineer who sits inside our customers' stacks and gets them running in production. If you like hard technical problems and talking to the people who have them, this is for you.

What You'll Work On

Embed with customer engineering teams to scope, build, and deploy Fastino models into their production systems.
Write real code: integrations, data pipelines, eval harnesses, and services that run on customer infra (cloud, VPC, on prem).
Fine-tune and evaluate models on customer data, and prove they beat the baseline on accuracy, latency, and cost.
Debug the messy stuff: auth, networking, GPU and inference performance, data quality, weird edge cases.
Own the technical side of deals from first call through go-live, working closely with our founders and AEs.
Turn what you build in the field into reusable tools, reference architectures, and SDK improvements.
Bring customer feedback straight to research and product, and push for what customers actually need.

What We're Looking For

BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent experience).
3+ years as a software engineer, ideally with some time in a customer facing role (FDE, solutions engineering, consulting, or similar).
Strong in Python. Comfortable with at least one of TypeScript, Go, or Rust.
Hands on experience shipping LLM or ML systems to production: APIs, fine-tuning, evals, RAG, or agents.
Solid with cloud and infra basics: AWS/GCP/Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, networking, and security.
Clear communicator who can explain tradeoffs to an engineer and a VP in the same meeting.
Ownership mindset. You'd rather fix it yourself than file a ticket.
Bonus: experience with GLiNER, NER, or other information extraction models.
Bonus: early stage startup experience.
Willing to travel to customer sites as needed.

View posting at fastino.ai