Hybrid Engineering Manager – Forward Deployed Engineering, LLM

at Baseten

• Job title: Engineering Manager – Forward Deployed Engineering, LLM
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: $220,000 - $285,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Python, Ray
• Location requirements: Hybrid, San Francisco, United States

About the role

• Engineering Manager leading a team at Baseten, scaling and optimizing LLM inference workloads. Focused on AI application performance, reliability, and cost efficiency in cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• 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 company and customer goals, balancing short-term delivery, widely varying customer priorities, and long-term technical initiatives.
• 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 end-to-end (problem framing → evaluation → production deployment → monitoring). This involves working with customers’ engineering teams at every stage of the customer journey including: sales, implementation, and expansion.
• Deliver with velocity: turn vague objectives into clear specs and well-defined PoCs so we can rapidly ship well-tested services and outcomes for our customers
• Optimize and enhance AI/ML projects, contributing to the continuous improvement of our technical stack. This includes developing features and PRDs with other engineering and product orgs.
• Own products and customer projects end-to-end, functioning as both an engineer, project manager, and product manager, with a focus on user empathy, project specification, and end-to-end execution.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 1+ year in a leadership or mentorship capacity.
• Strong programming skills in Python, with production experience in building or optimizing ML inference systems.
• Proven experience with LLMs, inference optimization, or serving frameworks (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT, Triton, Hugging Face, Ray Serve).
• Familiarity with observability, profiling, and cost/performance tradeoffs in production ML systems.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills—able to lead cross-functional efforts and drive outcomes in ambiguous, fast-paced environments.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
• Generous PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
• Paid parental leave
• Company-facilitated 401(k)
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.