Director, Forward Deployed Engineering - Open Models

NVIDIA•Us, CA

About The Position

NVIDIA is hiring a founding Director to build and lead its North America Forward Deployed Engineering organization for open models, including NVIDIA Nemotron and NVIDIA Cosmos. The organization helps partners deliver production-ready AI tuned to specific domains, enabling organizations to build, own, and run AI on open-source models. FDEs work primarily through NVIDIA’s partner ecosystem, alongside partner engineering and research teams, and co-lead engagements with end customers. They also create reusable recipes and playbooks that help partners deliver and scale solutions. The Director sets the organization’s strategy, builds the team, and represents its vision to partners, customers, and NVIDIA leadership. The role combines technical leadership in open-model post-training, evaluation, agent harness engineering, and inference optimization with organizational leadership, partner development, and customer engagement. Success means enabling hundreds of end customers to run domain-specific Nemotron or Cosmos models in production through a strong partner ecosystem.

Requirements

Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
14+ years of overall experience in ML or software engineering, applied AI, FDE, or solutions architecture.
8+ years leading technical teams and 5+ years of hands-on LLM post-training experience, including models taken to production.
Track record of building and scaling technical organizations across multiple locations and time zones, managing managers or leads, and setting goals and measuring results for a customer-facing technical team.
Deep technical credibility in post-training (LoRA/PEFT, SFT, and synchronous and asynchronous reinforcement learning), model architectures, synthetic data, and evaluation, as well as agent harness engineering and optimization for LLM and agentic systems.
Good understanding of large-scale distributed training and inference performance optimization across multi-GPU and multi-node systems.
Deep understanding of the partner, open-model, and cloud-provider ecosystem and where NVIDIA can add value.
Proven ability to build alignment across multiple partners and customers on the same engagement, including at the executive level.
Good understanding of how to drive ecosystem demand and match partners with customers.
Proven ability to scope engagements, shape SOWs, and deliver consistently high quality across many engagements at once.
Ability to communicate complex technical ideas clearly to audiences ranging from engineers to C-level executives.
Excellent judgment, prioritization, and organizational skills, and comfort leading through ambiguity.
Ability to travel to partner and customer sites and NVIDIA offices up to 25%.

Nice To Haves

Experience building and scaling an FDE, applied research, or solutions organization from an early stage.
History of building partner-led programs or ecosystem motions.
Hands-on experience with Nemotron, Cosmos, and other open models; serverless and self-managed post-training platforms such as the Tinker API; and open-source frameworks such as NVIDIA NeMo and Megatron.
A technical vision that influences product, engineering, and business decisions and drives production outcomes.
Experience with multimodal or world-foundation-model post-training and running training jobs on large GPU clusters with SLURM or Kubernetes.
Passion for using AI tools to improve how the team builds, delivers, and scales.

Responsibilities

Set strategy for the North America FDE organization and lead delivery of custom AI to end customers through NVIDIA’s partner ecosystem.
Hire and develop FDE leads, managers, and senior engineers across North America; establish a high bar for technical depth and customer impact, and build scalable team structures and growth paths.
Set technical direction for post-training, evaluation, harness engineering, and inference optimization, and advise the team on its hardest engagements.
Monitor developments in open models, post-training, and agents, and identify new use cases and partner opportunities.
Build trusted relationships with partner and end-customer leaders; shape joint plans and agreements; and guide three-way engagements through production.
Set goals and track outcomes, including partner adoption of Nemotron, customers running models in production, and customers willing to speak publicly.
Help partners succeed independently through reusable recipes, reference pipelines, and playbooks.
Connect NVIDIA model research with partner and customer use cases; work with Product, Research, and Engineering to bring field learnings into Nemotron, Cosmos, and NVIDIA’s software stack.
Share effective practices with FDE leaders in other regions.
Align priorities and resources with sales, partner, and solutions leaders; keep senior leadership informed of progress; and speak about NVIDIA domain-specific open models.