Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer — Wafer (wafer.ai)

Inference performance depends on how efficiently models use the underlying hardware. Techniques across kernels, compilers, runtimes, and serving systems can dramatically improve latency and throughput. None of that matters until it is running in a customer's production traffic.

At Wafer, we are building AI systems that automatically optimize inference workloads across silicon. The goal is fungible token capacity. Any accelerator optimized toward serving inference most efficiently. Wafer is well funded and serves trillions of tokens a day for mission critical workloads. We serve the highest performance inference to fast-growing AI startups.

Forward Deployed Engineers serve as the link between Wafer's core product and customers' challenges, managing the relationship from start to finish.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own customer accounts end to end. Sales gets the first meeting. From there you are both the customer's engineer and their point of contact: you decide what to prove, you build it, you keep it running in production, and you carry the relationship.
• Win the technical evaluation. Prove Wafer on the customer's own workload rather than a synthetic benchmark, and be the person who can explain the result to their engineers.
• Ship the integration. Stand up dedicated deployments and optimize the full stack for the customer's workload.
• Own production for your accounts. When latency moves or error rates climb, you find it, you fix it or route it, and you are who the customer hears from.
• Inform product roadmap. You sit closer than anyone to how Wafer behaves under real load, and the engineering team builds against what you report.

WHAT WE LOOK FOR

• You are an exceptional engineer. You have shipped and operated production systems, and you can still open a profiler, read a trace, and find the problem yourself. Inference experience helps, but it matters more that you can be handed an unfamiliar system and own it inside a week.
• You have owned a customer relationship. You can name an account that was yours, say what was going wrong, and describe what you personally did about it.
• You are credible in a room full of engineers. You can take a skeptical ML team through a benchmark, defend the methodology, and concede the point when they are right.
• You work without a spec. The problem arrives half-defined from a customer who does not yet know what they need, and you come back with a scoped answer rather than a list of questions.

HOW WE EVALUATE — WAFER HIRING RUBRIC Every candidate is scored 1-5 on each of seven core values. A great hire scores 4-5 on most. A single 1 on any value is a strong no-hire signal.

1. Infinitely Resourceful — self-improving, biased for action, agentic. Doesn't wait for permission. Finds the answer, builds the thing, unblocks themselves. History of teaching themselves hard things fast. Ships constantly. Takes on problems outside their scope unasked.
2. Exceptionalism — have they been world-class at something? Somewhere in their past they went way beyond what was expected. Doesn't have to be in our domain. Top of a competitive field, built something remarkable, or achieved at a level hard to explain without extraordinary drive and talent.
3. Unreasonable Standards — they hate losing more than they like winning. Obsessed with excellence. Every output has their name on it. Losses are personal and lead to immediate, intense course correction.
4. Company Over Self — optimizes for the company winning, not their own comfort, title, or ego. Does the unglamorous work without complaint. Fixes problems because they needed fixing. True 'whatever it takes' person.
5. High EQ — reads between the lines. Tasteful. Direct without damage. Feedback flows freely with no hard feelings. Understands what people actually need, not just what they say.
6. Learns Quickly — iterative, admits when wrong, actually changes. Tight internal feedback loop. Would rather have this person with zero domain experience than a mediocre expert. Growth rate visibly compounding.
7. First Principles Thinker — can stare at a novel problem and reason through it. Not a pattern matcher. Questions assumptions, breaks problems into fundamentals, builds thinking from there.

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS

• $180,000-$240,000 base salary + generous equity.
• Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Daily lunch and dinner, unlimited PTO, and parental leave.
• $1K/month housing stipend (post-tax) if you live within 0.5 miles of the office.
• Covered Uber/Waymo from/to office.
• Visa sponsorship available.

HOW WE WORK On-site in San Francisco, five days a week. Small team with massive surface area and ownership. Complete autonomy over how to solve problems. We don't see engineers as code writers, but as problem solvers. Forward deployed here means deployed into the customer's stack, their Slack, and their problems. Mostly from San Francisco, but sometimes on site with the customer.