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 to ship AI products.
THE ROLE
As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Baseten, you will partner directly with customers to architect, build, and deploy high-scale post-training solutions on Baseten’s platform. You’ll own the journey with customers from initial exploration to production deployment, translating ambiguous business goals into performant fine-tuning pipelines.
This role is a great fit for entrepreneurial engineers who want a front-row view into how modern companies adopt post-training at scale. You’ll work across product, software development, research, and customer teams to deliver performant and observable post-training pipelines.
To be clear, this is a technical, hands-on role focused on software development, architecture design, and experiment design, with aspects of product management, technical customer success, and pre-sales solution engineering mixed in.
THE PRODUCT
Take a look at what we’ve built so far:
Baseten Loops beta launch
Training Infra GA launch
Autoresearch on Baseten
RECENT RESEARCH
Dense, on-policy, or both?
Repeated KV cache for long-running agents
Distillation without the dark – replicating black-box on-policy distillation on Baseten
RESPONSIBILITIES
Develop and maintain software systems and product features using Python in a production-level environment.
Drive customer impact by designing, implementing, and deploying Baseten solutions end-to-end: problem framing, evaluations, post-training approach and experiment design, experimentation, quantization, and production deployment. 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 our post-training solutions, contributing to the continuous improvement of our technical stack. This includes developing features and PRDs with engineering and product teams.
Own products and customer projects end-to-end, functioning as an engineer, project manager, and product manager, with a focus on user empathy, project specification, and end-to-end execution.
Navigate ambiguity and exercise good judgment on the tradeoffs and tools needed to solve problems, avoiding unnecessary complexity.
Demonstrate pride, ownership, and accountability for your work, and expect the same from your teammates.
REQUIREMENTS
Experience working with RL and SFT for large language models.
Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field.
2+ years of professional work experience in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
Python proficiency.
Strong communication skills, particularly on complex technical topics.
BENEFITS
Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
Paid parental leave
Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
Company-facilitated 401(k)
Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.
Apply now to embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward-thinking team, we would love to hear from you.
At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.
We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).
Skills Required
- Experience working with reinforcement learning (RL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for large language models
- Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
- 2+ years of professional work experience in a fast-paced, high-growth environment
- Python proficiency
- Strong communication skills on complex technical topics
Baseten Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Baseten and has not been reviewed or approved by Baseten.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Feedback suggests pay targets the top of market with explicit ranges in postings and a stated aim to provide 90th percentile salaries with equity. Role descriptions emphasize competitive, experience-based pay bands and meaningful stock grants.
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare is described as fully covered for medical, dental, and vision for employees and their families, reducing out-of-pocket costs. This comprehensive coverage is consistently highlighted alongside other core benefits.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time off policies include unlimited PTO with a minimum expectation of at least four weeks, 16 paid company holidays, and a company-wide winter break. These elements indicate substantial protected time away from work.
Baseten Insights
What We Do
AI’s future won’t be a few massive models built by a handful of labs. It’ll be millions of specialized models embedded into every product, workflow, and experience by the people closest to the customer. The foundation of that future is inference. Inference determines the performance, reliability, latency, and economics of every AI product. For AI to scale globally, it must be as reliable, fast, cost-effective, and high-quality as possible. That’s why Baseten exists. Companies like Abridge, Cursor, Lovable, Notion, and OpenEvidence depend on Baseten to power mission-critical AI workloads in production.
Why Work With Us
We’re an interdisciplinary team of researchers, engineers, and operators building the Inference Cloud our AI future demands. We’re running at a hard systems problem that requires first-principles thinking across the entire stack. The bar is high. We work hard, move fast, and care deeply about quality.
