Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Forward Deployed
Fal AI is hiring a Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Forward Deployed in San Francisco, United States. It pays $180k-$250k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Level.
AI in this role
fal is the generative media ecosystem powering the next generation of AI products. We build the infrastructure, tools, and model access that teams need to move from idea to production, and do it at scale without compromise. For developers and enterprises, fal is the foundation that makes generative media not just possible, but practical: a unified platform where high-performance inference, orchestration, and observability come together to unlock new categories of AI-native products.
As generative media reshapes industries across a market projected to grow by hundreds of billions over the next decade, fal is becoming the ecosystem that ambitious teams build on.
About this role:
As a Forward Deployed Engineer on Serverless, you will work directly with enterprise customers to help them deploy, scale, and operationalize their AI workloads on fal. This is a highly technical, customer-facing role where you’ll act as the bridge between Sales, Product and Infrastructure teams.
You’ll join customer calls, deeply understand their architecture and needs, and translate those into actionable implementation plans and product requirements. You will be responsible for unblocking customer deployments, accelerating onboarding, and ensuring enterprise accounts successfully reach production fast.
This is a role for someone who loves solving real-world engineering problems and wants direct ownership over outcomes that drive revenue and product growth.
What you’ll do:
Join enterprise onboarding calls and act as the technical owner for deployments
Help customers integrate their models into fal Serverless (APIs, scaling, observability, deployment workflows)
Debug customer issues end-to-end across frontend, backend, and infra layers
Translate customer feedback into clear product specs, tasks, and engineering priorities
Work closely with Product + Infra to ensure enterprise needs are shipped into the platform
Build custom proofs-of-concept or lightweight integrations to unblock adoption
Identify repeatable patterns across customers and turn them into reusable product features
Improve internal tooling, onboarding flows, and docs based on real customer pain points
Qualifications/Nice-to-haves:
5+ years of engineering background (Proficiency with TypeScript, Python, Postgres, and Next.js)
Experience working with customers in a technical capacity (Solutions Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, DevRel Engineer, or similar)
Comfortable jumping into ambiguous customer problems and finding solutions fast
Ability to understand complex systems and communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
Strong written communication skills (turning customer conversations into actionable specs/tasks)
Experience working across APIs, infrastructure, and cloud environments
High ownership mentality: you take responsibility for customer success end-to-end
Comfort operating in a fast-moving, low-process environmentExperience with serverless platforms, infra products, or developer platforms
Familiarity with observability tooling (logs, metrics, tracing)
Background in distributed systems, Kubernetes, or cloud-native deployment
Experience with AI/ML workloads in production
Experience in generative AI inference, training and compute space strongly preferred
Experience writing documentation, onboarding guides, or customer playbooks
What we offer at fal:
Interesting and challenging work
A lot of learning and growth opportunities
Health, dental, and vision insurance (US)
Regular team events and offsites
U.S. EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY INFORMATION:
fal provides equal employment opportunities to applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other classification protected by applicable law.
How we rate this
Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Forward Deployed at Fal AI rates 74 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.
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