Joblaze summary

The Forward Deployed Engineer at Goodfire plays a crucial role in integrating the company's interpretability platform into partner environments, ensuring technical delivery through hands-on coding and collaboration with customer teams. This position requires strong software engineering skills, particularly in Python and modern ML frameworks, along with the ability to bridge research and production effectively. Ideal candidates are those with a background in AI or ML, particularly in customer-facing roles, who thrive in dynamic, high-growth environments. Goodfire emphasizes a mission-driven culture, making this role pivotal in advancing AI safety and interpretability.

Joblaze insights

Listed about 2 months ago — first seen on Joblaze September 3, 2026. Last confirmed on Goodfire's careers page November 2, 2026.
Salary band is in line with the typical range for AI/ML roles (median ~$190,000).
Starts above 80% of 121 comparable mid ai/ml roles in United States that list Python we track (median $150,000 across 53 companies). See Python salary trends
Python appears in 49.8% of 478 comparable mid ai/ml roles in United States; JAX appears in 2.5% of 478 comparable mid ai/ml roles in United States.

Quick facts

Is the Forward Deployed Engineer role remote?: No — this is an on-site role in San Francisco, CA.
What's the salary range?: Goodfire lists $200,000–$325,000 for this role.
Where is the role based?: Goodfire is hiring for this position in San Francisco, CA.
What's the tech stack?: Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: JAX, PyTorch, Python.
What seniority level is this role?: Goodfire targets mid-level candidates for this position.
Is this full-time or contract?: Full-time for this Forward Deployed Engineer role at Goodfire.

From the original posting

About Goodfire

About the role

We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to be the technical backbone of our customer engagements, the person who takes our interpretability platform and makes it work inside a partner's environment, end-to-end. This role demands strong engineering capability, the ability to learn new domains fast, the creativity to design solutions under real-world constraints, and the comfort to operate directly alongside customer engineering and research teams.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role where you will be forward-deployed with our most strategic partners: writing production code, building integrations, running pilots, and owning technical delivery day-to-day.

This role turns frontier research into deployed reality. You will typically be working with deeply technical partners - Heads of AI, research teams, ML platform teams - across Life Sciences, Robotics and Vision, Language and Reasoning models, or new verticals, helping them integrate our platform into their model training stack.

Key responsibilities

Own technical delivery for partner engagements: build production-grade integrations of Goodfire's platform into customer environments — from API integrations and custom pipelines to internal tooling and evaluation workflows
Run pilots that prove value fast: design and execute creative, short-timeline pilots that demonstrate the platform's impact, often in parallel with or ahead of longer-term solution scoping
Embed with partner engineering teams: serve as the day-to-day technical point of contact, going deep in their codebase, understanding their infrastructure, and building trust through competence
Compound learnings across engagements: bring field insights back to the platform and research teams, identify repeatable patterns, and build shared tooling and playbooks that scale the Field Team
Bridge research and production: take novel interpretability methods from the Foundational Team and figure out how to make them work reliably in a partner's stack — this means being comfortable reading papers, prototyping new techniques, and hardening them for production use

What you’ll bring

Required experience

Strong software engineering skills with production experience in Python and modern ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX).
Ability to work across research and engineering boundaries - you can understand a new technique and figure out how to ship it.
Scrappiness, willingness to persist in ambiguity, ability to learn quickly, and a generalist "can-do" mindset.
Strong communication skills - you can explain technical tradeoffs clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred qualifications

Technical degree or equivalent professional experience within AI, ML, or a related field.
Experience in a forward-deployed, solutions, or customer-facing engineering role. Former technical founders encouraged to apply.
Track record of excellence in a high-growth startup or frontier AI lab.
Experience with large language models, including fine-tuning, evaluation frameworks, or agent development.
Familiarity with interpretability, mechanistic interpretability, or model internals (sparse autoencoders, feature steering, etc.).

The expected salary range for this position is $200,000 - $325,000 USD.

Standard company text repeated across Goodfire's postings is omitted here.

Forward Deployed Engineer