Technical Program Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering
Baseten · San Francisco
About this 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 help frontier AI companies 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: Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) Forward Deployed Engineering is Baseten’s **SWAT team**—deeply technical, customer-strong, and fast. FDEs tackle the hardest inference problems for our most strategic customers: novel architectures, extreme scale, and tight latency budgets. Then we turn those solutions into a platform no one can match. This is a **high-visibility role** with direct exposure to our largest customers and company leadership. You’ll help shape how a new kind of engineering team operates in the AI industry. --- ## Responsibilities - **Run the priority account cadence**: own the operating rhythm for top accounts (daily hot-account check-ins, weekly “forest view” review with leadership, and the account list with Sales leadership) to ensure **zero surprise escalations** to execs. - **Make the bridges work**: ensure clear ownership, cadence, and SLAs across connections between FDE and SA/Sales, Product, engineering (inference/infra), capacity, and on-call. - **Account transitions**: manage transitions between Solution Architect and FDE with **exit criteria and runbooks**. - **Escalation management**: handle non-P0 escalations to engineering teams, track them, and burn them down weekly. - **Feed the product roadmap**: ensure customer patterns and gaps flow into product planning. - **Drive cross-team programs** for largest customers (e.g., dedicated-capacity rollouts, cluster migrations, capacity reservations, large customer launches) so work runs on a plan—not heroics. - **Reduce toil and protect platform time**: track where engineering time goes (incidents owned by other teams, manual routing/config changes, after-hours pages) and partner with engineering leads to remove major obstacles so FDEs keep **30%** of time for platform shaping. - **Own the metrics**: build and report a metrics scorecard (account health, response times, toil, load per engineer, team health) to leadership. - **Help scale the team**: drive new-hire enablement/certification, account load balancing, and runbook coverage; partner with Recruiting on hiring operations. - **Manage risk and dependencies**: surface cross-team risks early, drive mitigation, and provide honest, signal-rich updates to leadership. - **Communicate up/down/across**: translate between technical teams and senior leadership; run program reviews and write crisp statuses for fast decisions. --- ## Requirements - **5+ years** as a TPM (or engineer turned TPM) on **infrastructure, cloud, or customer-facing technical programs**. - **Technical depth**: comfortable with **ML infrastructure systems**, **Kubernetes**, **GPUs**, and **distributed systems**; can follow an incident channel or design doc without a translator. **LLM inference experience is a strong plus**. - Experience running programs across many teams at once without formal authority. - Calm during escalations—bring structure to chaos and close the loop. - Clear, concise writing f
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