Director, Forward Deployed Engineering - Open Models

About the role

NVIDIA is hiring a founding Director to build and lead its Forward Deployed Engineering organization for open models, including NVIDIA Nemotron and NVIDIA Cosmos, across North America. The team turns open models into production-ready, domain-specific AI delivered through NVIDIA's partner ecosystem, working alongside partner engineering and research teams and co-leading joint customer engagements. The role sets the strategy for North America, builds the organization and carries the vision to partners, customers and NVIDIA leadership.

Key responsibilities

• Set the strategy and lead the team that delivers custom AI to end customers through the partner ecosystem, aiming for hundreds of customers running domain-specific Nemotron or Cosmos in production.
• Hire and develop FDE leads, managers and senior engineers across North America, with clear growth paths and a scalable team structure.
• Define the technical direction for post-training, evaluation, harness engineering and inference optimization, and stay ahead of the open model, post-training and agents landscape.
• Build trusted relationships with partner and end-customer leaders, shape joint plans and agreements, and track adoption, production deployments and public endorsements.
• Deliver reusable recipes, reference pipelines and playbooks so partners can succeed independently.
• Work with Product, Research and Engineering to feed field insights back into Nemotron, Cosmos and the software stack, align with sales, partner and solutions leaders, and speak on domain-specific open models.

Required profile

• Bachelor's, Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 14+ years in ML or software engineering, applied AI, FDE or solutions architecture, including 8+ years leading technical teams and 5+ years of hands-on LLM post-training with models in production.
• Track record of building and scaling technical organizations across locations and time zones, managing managers or leads and measuring results for a customer-facing team.
• Ability to scope engagements, shape SOWs and deliver consistently high quality across many engagements at once.
• Travel to partner and customer sites and NVIDIA offices up to 25%.

Required skills

• Post-training (LoRA/PEFT, SFT, synchronous and asynchronous reinforcement learning), model architectures, synthetic data, evaluation, agent harness engineering and optimization.
• Good understanding of large-scale distributed training and inference on multi-GPU and multi-node systems.
• Deep understanding of the partner, open model and cloud provider ecosystem.
• Preferred: experience building an FDE, applied research or solutions organization; hands-on experience with Nemotron, Cosmos, serverless and self-managed post-training platforms, and NVIDIA NeMo and Megatron; experience with multimodal or world-foundation-model post-training and SLURM or Kubernetes.

What we offer

• Base salary of 320,000 USD to 488,750 USD depending on location, experience and market pay.
• Eligibility for equity and benefits.