Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Model Customization and Optimization)
Amazon Web Services· Boston, Seattle, Arlington, New York and East Palo Alto, US
Posted October 29, 2026
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Pay
- $168K – $227K per year
- Education
- Bachelor's in computer science or equivalent (preferred)
- Location
- Boston, Seattle, Arlington, New York and East Palo Alto, US
- Work mode
- On-site
- Job type
- Full-time
About this role
AWS's Custom Models and Optimization team embeds engineers with strategic customers to build, customize and run generative AI models. This senior role leads those engagements technically, from choosing a customization strategy to running training and inference on AWS Trainium.
What you will do
- Lead the technical engagement as embedded lead inside a customer
- Choose the customization path (fine-tuning, distillation, RL, continued pre-training)
- Own data strategy, synthetic data and evaluation methodology
- Design distributed training and RL post-training systems
- Design production inference architectures with engines like vLLM and SGLang
- Lead migrations of workloads to AWS Trainium using the Neuron SDK
- Mentor the team and lead design and code reviews
- Turn engagement learnings into reusable recipes and tooling
What the employer expects
- 5+ years of professional software development
- 5+ years leading design or architecture of systems
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or team lead
- Hands-on experience training, fine-tuning or optimizing deep learning models
- Ability to communicate with technical and executive audiences
- Up to 25% travel
Benefits
- Sign-on payments and RSUs
- Health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription)
- 401(k) matching
- Paid time off
- Parental leave
Skills
- Deep learning
- LLM post-training
- Reinforcement learning
- PyTorch FSDP2
- Megatron-LM
- vLLM
- SGLang
- AWS Trainium
- AWS Neuron SDK
- Distributed training
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