Forward Deployed Engineer

The Opportunity

You'll own the technical path from customer evaluation to silicon design and win on a genuinely novel architecture, the Quadric Chimera GPNPU, which runs everything from CNNs to LLMs to arbitrary C++ on one core, with no fallback processor. Unlike a FAANG solutions role, you'll work the entire stack: quantization, custom kernels, and compiler and your fingerprints will be on chips that ship in cars, cameras, and network appliances.

At a Series C company, every design win has outsized impact. Our FDEs also build with frontier agentic tooling (Claude Code-based agentic workflows) — you won't just be supporting the product, you'll be inventing how edge-AI field engineering is done.

Own the Technical Path to Design Win

• Convert 2-3 active customer evaluations into committed design wins by getting customer workloads running at target latency and accuracy on Chimera.
• Port customer workloads onto Chimera — architect, adapt, profile, and write custom kernels when required.

Embed with Customer Engineering Teams

• Work on-site and remotely with customer engineering teams: debug failures, hit benchmark targets, and guide model-architecture tradeoffs.
• Drive evaluations forward end-to-end, from first technical conversation through design win.

Build the Agentic FDE Toolkit

• Codify what you learn into reusable assets — SDK skills, porting playbooks, and agentic content — so each subsequent engagement moves faster than the last.
• Build applications and benchmark collateral that support future customer engagements.

Close the Loop Internally

• Partner with engineering and product teams to relay customer learnings and shape the roadmap.
• Contribute skills and playbooks to Quadric's growing agentic FDE toolset.

Within your first 6-12 months, you'll:

• Convert 2-3 active customer evaluations into committed design wins on the Chimera platform.
• Build deep fluency across the Chimera stack — quantization, custom kernels, and compiler tooling — well enough to unblock customers independently.
• Establish reusable SDK skills and porting playbooks that measurably shorten the next engagement's timeline.
• Become a trusted technical partner to customer engineering teams, known for translating ambiguous requirements into shipped results.
• Help define and refine Quadric's agentic (Claude Code-based) FDE workflow — there's no existing playbook yet; you'll help write it.

Required

• Strong C++ and Python; has written performance-critical code for a constrained target (DSP, NPU, GPU, or embedded SoC).
• Systems-level performance intuition — memory bandwidth, data movement, cycle-level reasoning — and can read a profile and know where the time went.
• High agency and independent problem-solving; methodical and empirical rather than theoretical.
• Comfortable operating without a playbook and in ambiguity — this role is still being defined.

Preferred

• Prior FAE, Sales Engineering, or FDE title — or startup experience as the de facto owner of an end-to-end implementation.
• Familiarity with agentic dev tooling (Claude Code, MCP) — or strong enthusiasm to adopt it.
• Background at NPU/edge-AI IP and silicon companies (e.g., Qualcomm SNPE/QNN, NVIDIA TensorRT/Jetson field engineering, Ceva, Cadence Tensilica, Synopsys ARC, Arm, Hailo, Ambarella, SiMa.ai, Axelera, Edge Cortix).
• Background at inference-focused startups (e.g., Groq, Untether, Tenstorrent) in field/customer engineering or kernel teams.
• FDE experience — candidates with embedded or ML-systems backgrounds.
• Experience at technical trading arms optimizing kernels or hardware for speed
• Big-firm consulting background, provided the candidate personally did the hands-on technical work rather than managing it.

The base salary range for this position is $175,000 to $225,000. This range reflects the full span of levels and geographies at which Quadric hires for this role. The actual base salary offered will depend on a number of factors, including the specific level of the role, years and depth of relevant experience, technical skills and competencies, the criticality of the role to the business, internal equity, and work location.

In addition to base salary, this…