Technical Program Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, Open Evidence, 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 ship AI products.

Forward Deployed Engineering is Baseten’s swat team. We’re deeply technical, great with customers and fast, and we make the platform better with everything we learn in the field. FDEs take on the hardest inference problems for our most strategic customers: novel architectures, extreme scale, tight latency budgets. Then we turn those solutions into a platform no one can match.

We’re scaling the team quickly. We need someone to build the operating system that lets a fast-growing team of engineers stay focused on hard problems instead of coordination.

This is a high-visibility role with direct exposure to our largest customers and to company leadership. You’ll shape how a new kind of engineering team operates in the AI industry.

• Run the priority account cadence. Own the operating rhythm for our top accounts: daily hot-account check-ins, the weekly “forest view” review with leadership, and the account list itself with Sales leadership. Goal: zero surprise escalations to our execs.
• Make the bridges work. Our FDE team connects to SA and Sales, Product, engineering (inference, infra), capacity and on-call. You’ll make sure each connection has a clear owner, cadence and SLA, with no hand-offs falling through the cracks:
  • Account transitions between solution architect and FDE, with exit criteria and runbooks
  • Non-P0 escalations to engineering teams, tracked and burned down weekly
  • Customer patterns and gaps flowing into the product roadmap
• Drive cross-team programs for our largest customers. Coordinate multi-team efforts such as dedicated-capacity rollouts, cluster migrations, capacity reservations and large customer launches. Bring together various teams so these run on a plan, not on heroics.
• Reduce toil and protect platform time. Track where engineering time goes: incidents another team owns, manual routing and config changes, after-hours pages. Work with engineering leads to remove the biggest sources of obstacles, so FDEs keep 30% of their time for shaping the platform.
• Own the metrics. Build and report the metrics scorecard (account health, response times, toil, load per engineer, team health) to leadership.
• Help us scale the team. Drive programs like new-hire enablement and certification, account load balancing, and run book coverage. Partner with Recruiting on hiring operations as we grow.
• Manage risk and dependenci
  es. Maintain a clear-eyed view of cross-team dependencies and risks; surface them early, drive mitigation, and keep leadership informed with honest, signal-rich updates.
• Communicate up, down, and across. Translate between deeply technical teams and senior leadership. Run effective program reviews and write the kind of crisp statuses that let busy people make fast decisions.

• 5+ years as a TPM (or engineer turned TPM) on infrastructure, cloud or customer-facing technical programs
• Technical depth: you’re comfortable with ML Infra systems, Kubernetes, GPUs and distributed systems, and can follow an incident channel or a design doc without a translator. Experience with LLM inference is a strong plus.
• You’ve run programs across many teams at once and kept them moving without formal authority
• Calm in the middle of an…