Forward Deployed Engineer
Role Description
Forward Deployed Engineer
Full-time | San Francisco
About Fastino
- We're building specialized, efficient language models that beat big general models on the tasks that matter. Our team includes alumni from Google Research, Apple, Stanford, and Cambridge.
- Our open source GLiNER models have been downloaded 50M+ times and are used by teams at NVIDIA, Meta, and Airbnb.
- We've raised $25M (covered in TechCrunch) from Microsoft, Khosla Ventures, Insight Partners, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, Docker CEO Scott Johnston, and others.
The Role
You'll be the engineer who sits inside our customers' stacks and gets them running in production. If you like hard technical problems and talking to the people who have them, this is for you.
What You'll Work On
- Embed with customer engineering teams to scope, build, and deploy Fastino models into their production systems.
- Write real code: integrations, data pipelines, eval harnesses, and services that run on customer infra (cloud, VPC, on prem).
- Fine-tune and evaluate models on customer data, and prove they beat the baseline on accuracy, latency, and cost.
- Debug the messy stuff: auth, networking, GPU and inference performance, data quality, weird edge cases.
- Own the technical side of deals from first call through go-live, working closely with our founders and AEs.
- Turn what you build in the field into reusable tools, reference architectures, and SDK improvements.
- Bring customer feedback straight to research and product, and push for what customers actually need.
What We're Looking For
- BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent experience).
- 3+ years as a software engineer, ideally with some time in a customer facing role (FDE, solutions engineering, consulting, or similar).
- Strong in Python. Comfortable with at least one of TypeScript, Go, or Rust.
- Hands on experience shipping LLM or ML systems to production: APIs, fine-tuning, evals, RAG, or agents.
- Solid with cloud and infra basics: AWS/GCP/Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, networking, and security.
- Clear communicator who can explain tradeoffs to an engineer and a VP in the same meeting.
- Ownership mindset. You'd rather fix it yourself than file a ticket.
- Bonus: experience with GLiNER, NER, or other information extraction models.
- Bonus: early stage startup experience.
- Willing to travel to customer sites as needed.
About Forward Deployed Engineering
Forward Deployed Engineers are embedded directly with customers to build custom solutions, integrate products into existing infrastructure, and bridge the gap between product engineering and customer success. The role combines deep technical skills with the ability to operate in client environments and translate business requirements into working software.
Originally pioneered by Palantir, the FDE model has spread across AI, enterprise SaaS, and cloud infrastructure companies. FDEs write production code, architect integrations, train customer teams, and feed product insights back to the core engineering organization. At companies like OpenAI, Salesforce, and Databricks, FDE teams are treated as elite engineering units that can ship custom solutions in days rather than quarters.
Typical FDE stack: Python, TypeScript, SQL, REST/GraphQL APIs, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), and increasingly LLM APIs and AI orchestration frameworks. Strong communication and the ability to context-switch between technical and business conversations are as important as coding ability.
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