Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed

Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed

At Wafer, we are building AI systems that automatically optimize inference workloads across silicon. Wafer is well funded and serves trillions of tokens a month for mission-critical workloads at fast-growing AI startups.

Forward deployed Members of Technical Staff work directly inside our customers' workloads. You'll take a customer from first benchmark to production, tune their deployment until it is the fastest they have seen, and keep it running.

What you'll do

• Run technical evaluations on the customer's own workload: understand the traffic, set up the benchmark and prove the result.
• Deploy and tune each customer's model, hardware and serving configuration for their latency and throughput targets.
• Own production for your accounts. When latency moves or error rates climb, you find it and fix it, and you are who the customer hears from.
• Build the tools, integrations and runbooks that make each new deployment faster than the last.
• Work with sales on scoping and with engineering on what to build next, based on what you see in production.

What we look for

• You are a strong engineer who has shipped and operated production systems. You can read a trace, open a profiler and find the problem yourself.
• Experience with LLM inference or serving, such as vLLM, SGLang or TensorRT-LLM, is a big plus.
• You have owned a technical customer relationship and can explain results to a skeptical engineering team.
• You are credible in a room full of engineers. You can defend a benchmark methodology and concede the point when they are right.
• You work without a spec. The problem arrives half-defined and you come back with a scoped answer rather than a list of questions.

How we evaluate

We score every candidate on seven values:

• Infinitely Resourceful
• Exceptionalism
• Unreasonable Standards
• Company Over Self
• High EQ
• Learns Quickly
• First Principles Thinker

Benefits

• Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Daily lunch and dinner, unlimited PTO, and parental leave.
• $1K/month housing stipend (post-tax) if you live within walking distance (0.5 miles) from the office.
• Relocation allowance and benefits.
• Covered Uber/Waymo from/to office.
• Visa sponsorship available.

How we work

On-site in San Francisco, five days a week. Small team with massive surface area and ownership. You operate with complete autonomy of how to solve problems.

Your success is measured by customers who move their production traffic to Wafer and stay because it keeps getting faster.