Forward Deployed Engineer, New Grad

Novita AI

San Mateo, California, United StatesFull-timePosted Oct 12, 2026

About the role

About Novita AI

Novita AI is an AI & Agent Cloud platform for builders.

We provide high-performance Model APIs, dedicated inference infrastructure, and Agent Sandbox environments that help developers and enterprises build, deploy, and scale production AI applications.

The Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you’ll work directly with customers building some of the most demanding AI applications.

You’ll operate at the intersection of software engineering, infrastructure, product, and customer success.

You may spend one day helping an AI startup diagnose inference latency, another helping a coding-agent company scale thousands of sandbox environments, and another building an integration that becomes a reusable product capability.

You will be expected not only to solve technical problems, but also to understand why those problems matter to the customer and what is required for their workload to successfully reach production.

What You’ll Do

Own the technical relationship with customers from evaluation through production.

Understand customer architectures, workloads, and engineering requirements.

Deploy and integrate:

Model APIs and inference endpoints

Dedicated model serving

Agent Sandbox environments

Debug issues across APIs, containers, Linux, networking, model serving, and distributed systems.

Analyze inference performance including latency, throughput, concurrency, caching, and reliability.

Build customer-specific integrations, prototypes, tools, and automation.

Support PoCs and help customers transition into production.

Work closely with Technical Account Executives on capacity planning, quotas, pricing considerations, and workload expansion.

Identify opportunities where customers can expand their usage of Novita.

Translate recurring customer problems into product requirements.

Build reusable tooling and reference implementations that improve the experience for future customers.

Work closely with engineering teams across the US and Asia.

What We’re Looking For

Requirements

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.

Strong software engineering fundamentals.

Proficiency in Python and experience with at least one additional programming language.

Strong understanding of APIs, Linux, networking, and cloud-native applications.

Experience debugging complex technical systems.

Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Comfortable working directly with customers.

High ownership and ability to operate in ambiguous environments.

Ability to move quickly between engineering, product, and customer problems.

Nice to Have

Experience with LLMs, AI agents, or inference infrastructure.

Familiarity with vLLM, SGLang, Ray, or distributed serving frameworks.

Experience with Docker and Kubernetes.

Understanding of model serving performance, including batching, caching, throughput, latency, and concurrency.

Experience building coding agents, AI agents, or sandboxed execution systems.

Open-source contributions, startup experience, or significant technical side projects.

Background in solutions engineering, developer relations, technical consulting, or other customer-facing technical roles.

Interest in the commercial side of technology, including how usage, pricing, and product adoption connect.

Professional working proficiency in Mandarin Chinese.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first year, you will:

Independently own the technical relationship with multiple customers.

Help strategic customers successfully move workloads into production.

Become a trusted technical advisor to customer engineering teams.

Build reusable solutions that accelerate future deployments.

Identify technical and product opportunities that increase customer adoption.

Influence Novita’s product roadmap through direct exposure to real production workloads.

Responsibilities

  • Own customer technical relationships from evaluation through production.
  • Understand customer architectures, workloads, and engineering requirements.
  • Deploy and integrate model APIs, inference endpoints, dedicated model serving, and Agent Sandbox environments.
  • Debug issues involving APIs, containers, Linux, networking, model serving, and distributed systems.
  • Analyze inference performance, including latency, throughput, concurrency, caching, and reliability.
  • Build customer integrations, prototypes, tools, automation, and reusable reference implementations.
  • Support proofs of concept and help customers move workloads into production.
  • Translate recurring customer problems into product requirements and identify opportunities to expand adoption.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals and proficiency in Python plus another programming language.
  • Strong understanding of APIs, Linux, networking, and cloud-native applications.
  • Experience debugging complex technical systems.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills and comfort working directly with customers.
  • High ownership and ability to work in ambiguous environments across engineering, product, and customer needs.
  • Nice to have: experience with LLMs, AI agents, inference infrastructure, vLLM, SGLang, Ray, Docker, or Kubernetes.
  • Nice to have: experience with model-serving performance, coding agents, sandboxed execution, customer-facing technical roles, or Mandarin Chinese.

Skills mentioned

PythonAPI IntegrationLinuxTCP/IPDockerKubernetesDistributed SystemsPerformance OptimizationModel ServingDebugging

About Novita AI

Novita AI is an AI & Agent Cloud platform built to make advanced AI infrastructure accessible, reliable, and cost-effective for developers and fast-growing teams. We provide high-performance Model APIs, GPU Cloud, and Agent Sandbox environments, enabling teams to build, deploy, and scale AI applications without managing complex infrastructure. From open-source LLMs and multimodal models to production-grade GPU workloads, Novita handles the heavy lifting so developers can focus on building. Our platform is trusted by startups, research teams, and AI-native companies running real production workloads—processing massive token volumes and GPU hours every day across global regions. We emphasize performance, transparency, and flexibility, with straightforward pricing and infrastructure designed for real-world usage. At Novita, we believe AI infrastructure should be open, efficient, and developer-first. Our mission is to lower the barrier to building powerful AI systems—whether you’re shipping your first prototype or operating at scale.

Technology11-50 employeesSan Francisco, California