Manager, Solutions Architect
About The Position
Baseten is hiring a Manager (Player & Coach) of the Solution Architect team to lead and mentor Solution Architects who partner with Sales and customers. The team translates business needs into technical solutions, conducts technical discovery, and guides repeatable deployments and proofs of value. This role combines hands-on technical ownership and managerial leadership, including guiding discovery calls, demos, technical scoping, POC execution, and the design, deployment, and management of high-performance, low-latency AI applications on Baseten’s platform. The manager will also partner with product, infrastructure, and other customer engineering teams to help LLMs and other generative AI systems deliver strong performance, reliability, and cost efficiency in production. While primarily leading the team, the manager is also expected to drive strategic product initiatives and customer engagements directly.
Requirements
- AI/ML background and ability to credibly discuss AI/ML topics with technical stakeholders.
- At least 4 years of professional Solution Architecture or Solutions Engineering experience.
- At least 1 year of experience in a leadership or mentorship capacity.
- Strong customer-facing communication skills, including the ability to run structured discovery and clarify ambiguous requirements.
- Technical depth to scope solutions without needing to write production code.
- Ability to script and prototype as needed, including comfort with 'vibe coding' to move quickly in technical workflows.
Nice To Haves
- Experience running or supporting benchmarks for ML inference deployments.
- Familiarity with infrastructure tradeoffs relevant to inference performance and cost, such as GPU selection and latency-versus-throughput tuning.
- Experience serving as a cross-functional technical lead for customer POCs, including coordination across Sales and Engineering.
- Professional software engineering experience.
Responsibilities
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Solution Architects, providing guidance on technical direction, project execution, and professional development.
- Set clear goals and ensure timely, high-quality delivery across multiple customer-facing LLM deployment and inference optimization projects.
- Align team priorities with company and customer goals while balancing short-term delivery, varying customer priorities, and long-term technical initiatives.
- Partner with Sales on customer discovery calls, most often second calls and occasionally first calls for large accounts.
- Lead demos and technical scoping to align on success criteria, architecture, and deployment approach.
- Own benchmarking and repeatable deployments, including standard deployment patterns and configurations across LLMs, embeddings, image and video generation, and VoiceAI.
- Advise on infrastructure and performance tradeoffs, such as H100 versus B200 GPUs and latency-optimized versus throughput-optimized setups.
- Drive consistent playbook-style deployments for common models and use cases.
- Develop expertise in runtimes such as vLLM, SGLang, and TRT-LLM and their configurations and tradeoffs.
- Scope POCs and keep stakeholders aligned on timelines, deliverables, and next steps.
- Coordinate POC execution as the project lead, bringing in Forward Deployed Engineering support when deeper or more complex technical work is needed.
- Drive strategic product initiatives and participate directly in customer engagements.
- Partner with product, infrastructure, and customer engineering teams to support production performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
- For U.S. employees: 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents.
- Flexible PTO policy, including a company-wide Winter Break when offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day.
- Paid parental leave.
- Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot.
- For U.S. employees: company-facilitated 401(k).
- Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering learning and networking opportunities.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Manager
Education Level
No Education Listed
