Forward Deployed ML Engineer

Rockstar

13h•Remote

About The Position

Rockstar is recruiting for a forward-deployed machine learning engineer role at a leading AI infrastructure company. The client is building the AI backbone for the next generation of intelligent products, helping fast-growing AI startups design, fine-tune, evaluate, deploy, and maintain specialized models across text, vision, and embeddings. Think of it as a full-stack backend for training, RL, inference, evaluation, and long-term model maintenance. Their customers are Series A–C AI companies building enterprise-grade products, and their promise is simple: they make AI systems better. About the Company The company is building the AI backbone for the next generation of intelligent products. It helps fast-growing AI startups design, fine-tune, evaluate, deploy, and maintain specialized models across text, vision, and embeddings. Think of it as a full-stack backend for training, RL, inference, evaluation, and long-term model maintenance. Its customers are Series A–C AI companies building enterprise-grade products. Its promise is simple: it makes your AI system better. - The Role The company is hiring a Forward Deployed Machine Learning Engineer (FD-MLE) to work directly with customers to deploy, adapt, and operate production ML systems on top of its platform. This is a high-execution, high-ownership role. The engineer will be embedded in customer problems, shipping real models into real production environments—often under tight timelines and ambiguous requirements. If you enjoy being close to users, moving fast, and doing the unglamorous work required to make ML systems actually work, this role is for you. - Why This Role Matters AI infrastructure often breaks down at the last mile—between a promising model and a reliable, scalable production system. As a Forward Deployed MLE, you are the connective tissue between the platform and customer success. You’ll: - Turn cutting-edge ML workflows into production-ready systems - Unblock customers facing data, training, inference, or deployment challenges - Feed real-world learnings back into product and platform design This role is ideal for early-career ML engineers who want maximum learning velocity, deep exposure to real systems, and accelerated responsibility.

Requirements

1–3 years of production ML engineering experience
You have deployed models that serve real users in production
You’ve worked on training, inference, or ML systems end-to-end
Strong fundamentals in ML engineering: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving.
Comfortable writing production-quality code and debugging complex systems.
Extremely diligent and hardworking
This is an execution-heavy role where effort and follow-through matter
You’re comfortable putting in the hours when needed to get things working
Clear communicator who can work directly with customers and internal teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience with LLMs, fine-tuning, embeddings, or RL-style workflows.
Exposure to GPU workloads, distributed training, or high-throughput inference.
Background in infra-heavy environments (ML platforms, data systems, dev tools).
Interest in customer-facing or forward-deployed roles.

Responsibilities

Deploy, fine-tune, and serve ML models in production environments (text, vision, embeddings, RL-adjacent workflows).
Work hands-on with customer data, model architectures, training loops, and inference stacks.
Debug performance issues across training, evaluation, latency, cost, and reliability.
Adapt the platform to customer-specific workflows and constraints.
Build and maintain model-serving pipelines (batch and real-time).
Optimize inference performance (throughput, latency, cost).
Help productionize evaluation, monitoring, and retraining workflows.
Work across cloud infrastructure, GPUs, and ML tooling stacks.
Act as the “voice of the customer” to internal product and engineering teams.
Identify recurring patterns, edge cases, and gaps in the platform.
Contribute to internal tooling, templates, and best practices.