AI Field Engineer - Strategic Partnerships
$200k - $260k • Remote • San Mateo • FullTime
Posted 3mo ago
Job Location
San Mateo
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
Fireworks is seeking an AI Field Engineer for Strategic Partnerships to be a technical owner for their most strategic partnerships. This role involves working closely with partner field teams, ISVs, and SIs to establish Fireworks as the primary inference and fine-tuning layer within partner AI architectures. You will bridge engineering, partner development, and customer delivery by building reference architectures, conducting benchmarks, resolving integration issues, and co-developing Proofs of Concept (POCs). The position requires strong technical skills, the ability to manage executive-level discussions on strategy and business outcomes, and a proactive approach to building and enabling solutions. You will also be responsible for leading discovery conversations, aligning stakeholders, and translating field feedback into product improvements to accelerate the development cycle.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the technical lead for co-sell initiatives with Strategic Partners, developing reference architectures, integration patterns, and joint POCs.
- Build end-to-end POCs and MVPs in collaboration with partner engineering teams, working within their existing codebases, infrastructure, and constraints.
- Conduct load tests to establish latency, throughput, and cost baselines, and optimize deployments to meet performance targets.
- Deploy and validate new model families on inference frameworks like vLLM and SGLang, optimizing configurations for various workloads.
- Advise customers on model selection, fine-tuning strategies (SFT, DPO, RFT), and evaluation methodologies.
- Develop and execute fine-tuning pipelines with customers, balancing model families, compute costs, and quality objectives.
- Design and implement evaluation frameworks that measure production-quality metrics.
- Manage the feedback loop, relaying partner-identified product gaps to Fireworks engineering and communicating roadmap updates to partners.
- Create external technical content, including reference architectures, integration guides, and benchmark posts.
- Monitor pipeline health and report risks and opportunities to Field leadership.
Requirements
- 3+ years in a pre-sales, partner engineering, forward-deployed, or technical consulting role.
- Proven ability to build production software with customers, including shipping code for their production environments.
- Strong Python skills, with experience reading, writing, and debugging production code.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes and infrastructure engineering.
- Hands-on expertise with LLM inference, including latency/throughput tradeoffs, batching, quantization, structured outputs, and function calling.
- Practical experience with fine-tuning techniques such as LoRA (RFT is a plus) and understanding the nuances of SFT.
- In-depth knowledge of the Azure AI stack, including Azure Foundry, Azure OpenAI Service, Azure ML, AKS, and Entra/RBAC for AI workloads.
- Exceptional communication skills, capable of leading discovery calls, presenting to VPs, and debugging technical issues.
- 5+ years in technical field or engineering roles with experience owning technical relationships with hyperscalers or major SIs (preferred).