AI Inference Engineer

About the role

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 https://www.baseten.co/blog/announcing-our-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 a Forward Deployed Engineer at Baseten, you will partner directly with customers to architect, build, and deploy high-scale production AI applications on Baseten’s platform. You’ll own the journey with customers from initial exploration to production deployment, translating ambiguous business goals into reliable, observable services with clear quality, latency, and cost outcomes.

This role is a great fit for entrepreneurial engineers who want a front-row view into how modern companies adopt AI at scale and who enjoy working across product, software development, performance engineering, and customer-facing implementations.

To be clear, this is an engineering role with hands-on coding and software development that also includes aspects of product management, technical customer success, and pre-sales solution engineering mixed in.

EXAMPLE INITIATIVES

Take a look at these blog posts written by members of our Forward Deployed Engineering team:

- Forward Deployed Engineering on the frontier of AI https://www.baseten.co/blog/forward-deployed-engineering/

- The fastest, most accurate Whisper transcription https://www.baseten.co/blog/the-fastest-most-accurate-and-cost-efficient-whisper-transcription/

- Deploy production-ready model servers from Docker images https://www.baseten.co/blog/deploy-production-model-servers-from-docker-images/

- Deploy custom ComfyUI workflows as APIs https://www.baseten.co/blog/deploying-custom-comfyui-workflows-as-apis/

RESPONSIBILITIES

- 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.