Director, Forward Deployed Engineering - Open Models

What you'll do

• Set organizational and technical strategy; hire and develop FDE leaders and engineers across North America.
• Lead partner, customer, and NVIDIA engagements from planning through production, and create reusable recipes, reference pipelines, and playbooks.
• Connect field use cases with NVIDIA Product, Research, and Engineering, and track partner adoption and customer production outcomes.

What they ask for

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 14+ overall 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 taken to production.
• Experience building and scaling technical organizations across locations and time zones, including managing managers or leads and measuring customer-facing team results.
• Deep expertise in post-training, model architectures, synthetic data, evaluation, agent harness engineering, and LLM/agentic system optimization; understanding of distributed training and multi-GPU, multi-node inference optimization.

Nice to have

• Experience building an FDE, applied research, or solutions organization early-stage; or building partner-led programs and ecosystems.
• Hands-on experience with Nemotron, Cosmos, open models, Tinker API, NVIDIA NeMo, or Megatron; multimodal or world-foundation-model post-training; large GPU clusters with SLURM or Kubernetes.

Pay

320,000 USD - 488,750 USD (base salary)

Tools

Nemotron, Cosmos, LoRA/PEFT, SFT, Tinker API, NVIDIA NeMo, Megatron, SLURM

AI focus

Leads post-training, evaluation, agent harness engineering, and inference optimization for domain-specific open models, bringing them into production through partners.