1. Fastino
  2. /
  3. Forward Deployed Engineer
Sign in

Role description

Forward Deployed Engineer

Fastino logoFastino
AI-native
TypeFull-time
WorkplaceHybrid
SeniorityMid-level
LocationSan Francisco, CA
Posted10/19/2026
Engineering

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.

Relevant archetypes

Apply on Ashby
Save

Company info

Fastino logo

Fastino

Fastino Labs is a research lab based in Palo Alto, California, building small language models and tooling such as Pioneer to inference and fine-tune language models. The company is the creator of Pioneer, a platform that improves the accuracy of language models in production over time, and the GLiNER open-source model family, which has been downloaded more than 30 million times and is used in production by Fortune 500 teams including NVIDIA, Meta, and Airbnb. Fastino Labs has raised $25 million through its seed round and is backed by investors including Khosla Ventures, Insight Partners, and Microsoft M12.

Seed
HQUnited States
Size11–50 employees
IndustryResearch Services
Latest funding
Seed · Jul 3, 2025

Claim fastino.ai

Work at fastino.ai? Sign in to claim this org and manage its profile.

ThesisExploreTermsPrivacy
© 2026 Saywise Inc.