Director, Forward Deployed Engineering - Open Models
$320k - $489k • US, CA, Santa Clara
Posted 1d ago
Job Location
US, CA, Santa Clara
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Categories
AI Engineer
About the job
NVIDIA is seeking a founding Director to establish and lead its Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization for open models, specifically focusing on NVIDIA Nemotron and NVIDIA Cosmos across North America. The core mission is to transform open-source models into production-ready AI solutions tailored to specific domains, leveraging NVIDIA's partner ecosystem. This role involves setting the strategic direction for North America, building and scaling the FDE team, and fostering strong relationships with partners, customers, and NVIDIA leadership. The FDE team will work collaboratively with top partner engineering and research teams, co-leading joint customer engagements and developing best practices to ensure partner success and scalability. The ultimate goal is to empower organizations to build, own, and operate their AI on open-source models.
Responsibilities
- Set strategy and lead the team to deliver custom AI to end customers via the NVIDIA partner ecosystem.
- Deepen partner relationships and lead three-way engagements involving NVIDIA, partners, and end customers.
- Hire and develop FDE leads, managers, and senior engineers across North America, establishing high technical standards and customer impact.
- Define technical direction for post-training, evaluation, harness engineering, and inference optimization.
- Build trusted relationships with leaders at partner and end-customer companies to shape joint plans and drive engagements to production.
- Develop reusable recipes, reference pipelines, and playbooks to enable partners to succeed independently.
- Connect NVIDIA's model research with partner and customer use cases, feeding field insights back into model development.
- Align priorities and resources with sales, partner, and solutions leaders, and inform senior leadership on progress.
Requirements
- Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, or related field, or equivalent experience.
- 14+ years overall in ML or software engineering, applied AI, FDE, or solutions architecture.
- 8+ years leading technical teams.
- 5+ years of hands-on LLM post-training experience with models taken to production.
- Proven track record of building and scaling technical organizations across multiple locations and time zones.
- Deep technical credibility in post-training (LoRA/PEFT, SFT, reinforcement learning), model architectures, synthetic data, evaluation, and agent harness engineering.
- Strong understanding of large-scale distributed training and inference performance optimization across multi-GPU and multi-node systems.
- Deep understanding of the partner, open model, and cloud provider ecosystem.
- Proven ability to build alignment across multiple partners and customers, including at the executive level.
- Ability to scope engagements, shape SOWs, and deliver high-quality results across multiple concurrent engagements.
- Excellent communication skills for conveying complex technical ideas to diverse audiences.
- Strong judgment, prioritization, and organizational skills, with comfort leading through ambiguity.
- Willingness to travel up to 25% to partner and customer sites and NVIDIA offices.
Benefits
- Equity
- Benefits