Forward Deployed Engineer

Reflection • San Francisco, CA

5d

About The Position

Reflection is a research lab focused on making intelligence open and accessible for everyone to use, customize, and build on. Forward Deployed Engineers serve as technical owners for customer engagements, leading strategic work from discovery and solution architecture through proof-of-concept and production delivery. The role spans the AI stack, including GPU orchestration, inference, model post-training, and custom harnesses and applications.

The engineer partners with customer machine learning and engineering teams to win and deliver strategic engagements, then turns field learnings into input that shapes Reflection’s models and platform. The role also contributes to the deployment organization by creating reusable playbooks, reference architectures, technical assets, and best practices.

Requirements

• Strong technical fluency, including the ability to read, write, and reason about code, architecture, and system behavior.
• Strong Python skills and experience shipping production-grade systems.
• Track record leading complex technical projects, coordinating contributors across workstreams, making practical tradeoffs, removing obstacles, and owning end-to-end delivery outcomes.
• Hands-on experience deploying multi-node GPU clusters using Kubernetes or Slurm.
• Experience serving large models in production with tools such as vLLM or SGLang, and benchmarking tradeoffs such as quantization, caching, batching, and speculative decoding.
• Experience shipping LLM-based agents to production within the last 1–2 years, designing agent harnesses and evaluations, and understanding when post-training can be used.
• At least 5 years of relevant experience delivering technical systems, including at least 2 years in a technical leadership role such as tech lead, engineering manager, or founding engineer.
• Ability and interest in customer-facing work, including understanding user needs, architecting solutions for business problems, and delivering tangible outcomes.
• Ability to work from a whiteboard session through debugging a deployment in a customer environment.
• Self-starter with high agency and ownership who works effectively in fast-paced startup environments where playbooks are still being developed.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical discovery with customer teams across inference workloads, agentic applications, and post-training; translate customer needs into feasible solutions and clear success criteria.
• Own proofs of concept end to end, including defining evaluation criteria, benchmarking real customer workloads, and demonstrating quality, latency, and cost against competing options.
• Architect and build complex AI systems, including agentic applications, model-serving infrastructure, evaluations, and post-training recipes.
• Own customer engagements and relationships, define project plans, coordinate work across workstreams, and keep customer stakeholders aligned.
• Identify recurring field patterns and model gaps that should inform Reflection’s platform and model capabilities.
• Build and validate prototypes, then generalize successful approaches into platform and research priorities.
• Help scale the deployment organization by defining playbooks, reference architectures, reusable technical assets, and best practices.

Benefits

• Top-tier compensation, with salary and equity structured to recognize and retain talent globally.
• Stock options for employees.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and life insurance, plus an annual wellness allowance.
• Lunch and dinner provided in the office daily.
• 22 weeks of paid parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents, including adoptive and surrogate journeys.
• Unlimited paid time off in the U.S. and 30 vacation days in the U.K.
• Visa sponsorship and support for long-term immigration pathways where applicable.
• Regular off-sites, happy hours, and team celebrations.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed