Forward Deployed Engineer
Fastino
About the role
Forward Deployed Engineer
Full-time | San Francisco
About Fastino
We're building specialized, efficient language models that beat big general models on the tasks that matter. Our team includes alumni from Google Research, Apple, Stanford, and Cambridge.
Our open source GLiNER models have been downloaded 50M+ times and are used by teams at NVIDIA, Meta, and Airbnb.
We've raised $25M (covered in TechCrunch) from Microsoft, Khosla Ventures, Insight Partners, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, Docker CEO Scott Johnston, and others.
The Role
You'll be the engineer who sits inside our customers' stacks and gets them running in production. If you like hard technical problems and talking to the people who have them, this is for you.
What You'll Work On
Embed with customer engineering teams to scope, build, and deploy Fastino models into their production systems.
Write real code: integrations, data pipelines, eval harnesses, and services that run on customer infra (cloud, VPC, on prem).
Fine-tune and evaluate models on customer data, and prove they beat the baseline on accuracy, latency, and cost.
Debug the messy stuff: auth, networking, GPU and inference performance, data quality, weird edge cases.
Own the technical side of deals from first call through go-live, working closely with our founders and AEs.
Turn what you build in the field into reusable tools, reference architectures, and SDK improvements.
Bring customer feedback straight to research and product, and push for what customers actually need.
What We're Looking For
BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent experience).
3+ years as a software engineer, ideally with some time in a customer facing role (FDE, solutions engineering, consulting, or similar).
Strong in Python. Comfortable with at least one of TypeScript, Go, or Rust.
Hands on experience shipping LLM or ML systems to production: APIs, fine-tuning, evals, RAG, or agents.
Solid with cloud and infra basics: AWS/GCP/Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, networking, and security.
Clear communicator who can explain tradeoffs to an engineer and a VP in the same meeting.
Ownership mindset. You'd rather fix it yourself than file a ticket.
Bonus: experience with GLiNER, NER, or other information extraction models.
Bonus: early stage startup experience.
Willing to travel to customer sites as needed.
Responsibilities
- Integrate and deploy Fastino models in customer production systems.
- Build integrations, data pipelines, evaluation tools, and services for customer infrastructure.
- Fine-tune and evaluate models using customer data.
- Debug authentication, networking, inference performance, and data quality issues.
- Lead technical work on customer deals from initial discussion through launch.
- Turn customer deployments into reusable tools, architectures, and SDK improvements.
- Share customer feedback with research and product teams.
Qualifications
- BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- At least 3 years of software engineering experience; customer-facing experience is preferred.
- Strong Python skills and familiarity with TypeScript, Go, or Rust.
- Experience deploying LLM or ML systems to production.
- Knowledge of cloud infrastructure, Docker, Kubernetes, networking, and security.
- Strong communication skills and an ownership mindset.
- Willingness to travel to customer sites as needed.
Skills mentioned
About Fastino
We believe the future of AI will be built on specialized small language models. To advance that mission, we're building Pioneer. Pioneer is the world's first agentic fine-tuning and inference system. With Pioneer, any developer can fine-tune, deploy, and continuously improve open source small language models in minutes, without writing a single line of code. Our research includes GLiNER and GLiNER2, open-source models with millions of downloads used by thousands of developers and organizations worldwide for entity extraction, text classification, and structured data extraction.
H-1B sponsorship history
Historical employer filing data was found for Fastino. The employer record includes 3 historical certified applications. This is employer-level history, not a guarantee that this role currently offers sponsorship.