Technical Program Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

About the role

Baseten builds the inference platform used by AI companies such as Cursor, Notion and OpenEvidence. Its Forward Deployed Engineering team takes on the hardest inference problems for its most strategic customers, then turns those solutions into a platform. This is a high-visibility role with direct exposure to the largest customers and company leadership, and it shapes how a new kind of engineering team operates in the AI industry.

Key responsibilities

• Run the priority account cadence: daily hot-account check-ins, weekly reviews with leadership, and the account list with Sales leadership, aiming for zero surprise escalations to executives.
• Connect the FDE team to Sales, Product, engineering, capacity and on-call, with clear owners, cadence and SLAs for account transitions, non-P0 escalations and customer patterns feeding the product roadmap.
• Coordinate multi-team programs for large customers, such as dedicated capacity rollouts, cluster migrations and capacity reservations.
• Track where engineering time goes and work with engineering leads to reduce toil, protecting 30% of FDE time for platform work.
• Build and report a metrics scorecard on account health, response times, toil, load per engineer and team health.
• Drive programs such as new-hire enablement, certification, account load balancing and runbook coverage, and partner with recruiting on hiring operations.
• Manage cross-team dependencies and risks, and communicate clearly between technical teams and senior leadership.

Required profile

• 5+ years as a TPM (or engineer turned TPM) on infrastructure, cloud or customer-facing technical programs.
• Experience running programs across many teams at once without formal authority.
• Calm under pressure during escalations, and able to write clearly for engineers and executives.
• High ownership, preferring to fix processes than work around them.

Required skills

• Comfort with ML infrastructure systems, Kubernetes, GPUs and distributed systems; experience with LLM inference is a strong plus.
• Nice to have: background in solutions engineering, SRE or forward-deployed teams.

What we offer

• Competitive compensation including meaningful equity.
• Medical, dental and vision insurance for employee and dependents (U.S. only).
• Flexible PTO including a company-wide winter break, paid parental leave and a fertility and family-building stipend.
• Company-facilitated 401(k) (U.S. only).