Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering (LLM)

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products. THE ROLE As an Engineering Manager (Player & Coach), you will lead and mentor a team of Forward Deployed Engineers focused on building, scaling, and optimizing LLM inference workloads for Baseten customers. Applying both hands-on technical ownership and managerial leadership, you will guide your team through the processes of designing, deploying, and managing high performance, low latency AI applications on Baseten’s platform. FDE at Baseten is not a sales function – we are a mix of engineering, product, and customer architects who contribute to the core Baseten codebase, drive large portions of our feature roadmap, and execute on complicated customer engagements. You will also partner with product, infrastructure, and other customer engineering teams to ensure that large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI systems del [... source excerpt omitted ...] og posts written by members of our Forward Deployed Engineering team: Forward Deployed Engineering on the frontier of AI The fastest, most accurate Whisper transcription Deploy production-ready model servers from Docker images Deploy custom ComfyUI workflows as APIs RESPONSIBILITIES Leadership & Team Management Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Forward Deployed Engineers, providing guidance on technical direction, project execution, and professional development. Set clear goals and ensure timely, high-quality delivery across multiple customer-facing projects involving LLM deployment and inference optimization. Collaborate with leadership to align team priorities with compan [... source excerpt omitted ...] er goals, balancing short-term delivery, widely varying customer priorities, and long-term technical initiatives. Player-coach – While much of this role will be leading the team, you will also be expected to be a key driver on strategic product initiatives and customer engagements. The best managers derive credibility from being able to be hands-on when needed. Technical Ownership Develop and maintain software systems and product features using one or more general-purpose programming languages in a production-level environment, with a preference for Python due to its relevance in ML projects. Drive customer impact by designing, implementing, and deploying Baseten solutions en