Technical Program Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering
About The Position
Baseten is hiring a Technical Program Manager for its Forward Deployed Engineering team, which solves complex inference problems for strategic customers and turns field learnings into platform improvements. The role builds the operating systems and coordination practices that help a fast-growing engineering team focus on technical work. It is high visibility, with direct exposure to major customers and company leadership. The role owns operating cadence for priority accounts, makes cross-functional handoffs and escalation paths reliable, and coordinates large customer programs across teams. It also tracks engineering toil and team metrics, develops programs to support team growth, manages risks and dependencies, and communicates program status to technical teams and senior leaders.
Requirements
- At least 5 years of experience as a Technical Program Manager or as an engineer who transitioned into TPM work, on infrastructure, cloud, or customer-facing technical programs.
- Technical familiarity with ML infrastructure systems, Kubernetes, GPUs, and distributed systems, with the ability to follow incident channels and design documents.
- Experience running programs across multiple teams and moving them forward without formal authority.
- Ability to bring structure to escalations and close the loop on follow-ups.
- Clear, concise writing for both engineers and executives.
- High ownership and a preference for improving processes rather than working around them.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with LLM inference.
- Experience working on an AI/ML infrastructure stack.
- Background in solutions engineering, SRE, or forward-deployed teams.
Responsibilities
- Own the operating cadence and priority account list for top accounts, including daily hot-account check-ins and weekly leadership reviews, with the goal of preventing surprise executive escalations.
- Establish clear owners, cadences, and SLAs for connections between Forward Deployed Engineering and Solutions Architecture, Sales, Product, engineering, capacity, and on-call teams.
- Manage account transitions between solution architects and FDEs, including exit criteria and runbooks.
- Track and drive weekly progress on non-P0 escalations to engineering teams.
- Ensure customer patterns and product gaps inform the product roadmap.
- Coordinate cross-team programs for major customers, including dedicated-capacity rollouts, cluster migrations, capacity reservations, and large customer launches.
- Track engineering toil, including incidents owned by other teams, manual routing and configuration changes, and after-hours pages; work with engineering leads to reduce obstacles and preserve FDE time for platform work.
- Build and report leadership metrics covering account health, response times, toil, engineer workload, and team health.
- Drive team-scaling programs such as new-hire enablement and certification, account load balancing, and runbook coverage.
- Partner with Recruiting on hiring operations as the team grows.
- Track cross-team dependencies and risks, surface them early, drive mitigation, and keep leadership informed.
- Translate between technical teams and senior leadership; run program reviews and write concise, decision-useful status updates.
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 and company-wide Winter Break, when offices are closed from Christmas Eve through 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, with learning and networking opportunities.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
