Technical Program Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

THE ROLE

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.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• 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 dependencies. 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.

REQUIREMENTS

• 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 escalation: you bring structure to chaos and close the loop

• You write clearly and concisely, for engineers and for execs

• High ownership, and you’d rather fix the process than work around it

NICE-TO-HAVES

• Experience working on AI / ML Infra stack.

• Background in solutions engineering, SRE or forward-deployed teams

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

• In your first few months, you'll have taken ownership of one or more in-flight programs, established the operating rhythm they were missing, and built the trust that makes teams want you in the room.

• Within a year, the programs you run are the ones leadership doesn't worry about, because the structure is clear, the risks are visible early, and the follow-ups always close.

BENEFITS

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity

• Paid parental leave

• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot

• (U.S. only) Company-facilitated 401(k)