Forward Deployment Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA

Department: Engineering

Responsibilities

• Lead Deployments: Own the end-to-end deployment of Subquadratic’s product in customer environments, focusing on building and deploying customized offerings atop our core product suite.
• Client Interaction: Interface directly with prospective clients, Business Development, Sales, and Product Management to craft and deliver customer-facing demonstrations and feature-complete solutions that exceed expectations.
• Integration Solutions: Collaborate closely with product engineering to address complex integration, data, and infrastructure challenges, ensuring solutions are not developed in isolation.
• Backend Development: Build and modify backend services, APIs, data pipelines, and tools as required for all customers.
• Pilot Support: Support pilots and early production rollouts, particularly for bespoke customer features, ensuring successful implementation.
• Model Fine-Tuning: Conduct supervised fine-tuning to achieve bespoke model performance using existing or internal tools.
• Product Improvement: Partner closely with Product and Engineering to drive enhancements based on customer feedback.
• Technical Ownership: Act as the technical owner for early customer implementations, guiding them through initial setups.

Requirements

• Experience: 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Backend Expertise: Strong background in backend engineering, including APIs, services, and data systems.
• Client Engagement: Experience working directly with customers or external stakeholders in a technical capacity.
• Adaptability: Ability to thrive independently in ambiguous, fast-paced environments.
• Communication: Strong communication skills with a high ownership mindset.
• Full-Stack Mastery: Deep expertise in TypeScript/React (performance tuning, state management, visualization) and proficiency in backend languages such as Python, Go, or Node.js. You should be capable of debugging a race condition in the database and a re-render loop in the browser on the same day.
• Systems Knowledge: Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including caching strategies (Redis/Memcached), database design (Postgres/DynamoDB), and cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP).
• API Development: Experience building public-facing APIs, developer consoles, or SDKs, with an understanding that APIs are products in their own right.

Nice to Have

• Speech AI Experience: Familiarity with speech AI technologies is preferred.

What We Offer

• Compensation: Competitive base salary plus uncapped commission.
• Equity Participation: Opportunity to participate in the employee option pool at a fast-growing AI infrastructure company.
• Work Environment: A high ownership, high trust environment with direct access to leadership and product teams.
• 10 Federal Holidays
• Unlimited PTO
• Full Health Benefits via Thatch

Commitment to Diversity

Subquadratic is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We are dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture that values authenticity and collaboration. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, protected veteran status, citizenship or immigration status, or any other legally protected characteristics.

E-Verify: Subquadratic uses E-Verify to confirm employment eligibility in compliance with federal law. For more information, please visit E-Verify.

Note: We do not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters or employment agencies and will not be responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.

About the Company

About Subquadratic

Subquadratic is an AI infrastructure and research company building a new class of LLMs on a proprietary post-transformer architecture. While the major labs focus on incremental transformer improvements, we're pushing foundational change at the model architecture level - enabling large-context, multimodal inference that scales efficiently where transformers can't.