AI Field Engineer
US$220,000 – US$280,000 / yr base salary
Posted 3 Aug 2026
Advertised as “AI Field Engineer, AI Infrastructure (Remote - US)”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Contract
- Full-time
- Visa sponsorship
- Offered
| Base salary | US$220,000 – US$280,000 / yr |
|---|
Lavendo partners with startups and high‑growth companies to help them hire top‑tier sales, GTM, and technical talent. This role is with one of our clients; we’ll share full details about the company and interview process as we get to know you and confirm mutual fit.
About the Company
Our client is a fast-scaling AI infrastructure company that helps enterprises and AI-native startups build, fine-tune, and serve their own specialized AI models — no more relying on someone else's black-box API. Their platform runs in production for some of the most recognizable names in tech, spanning text, image, embedding, audio, and multimodal workloads. Freshly backed by a Series D at a $17.5B valuation, this is a company with real scale, real customers, and real momentum behind it.
The Mission
They believe the next generation of great products will be built by companies that own their AI stack, not just rent it. Their mission is making open-model AI infrastructure genuinely fast, flexible, and production-grade for the teams building at the frontier.
The Opportunity
This is a forward-deployed engineering role where you're never far from either a terminal or a whiteboard with a VP on it. You'll work directly with VP Engineering, Head of AI/ML, and CTO-level partners at Fortune 500 enterprises and cutting-edge AI-native startups, owning the technical win from the first discovery call all the way through production. Two tracks are open — Enterprise and AI-Native — same role, different customer base, and we'll talk through which fits your background and interests best.
What You'll Do
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Run the full pre-sales field cycle yourself: discovery, POC scoping, model evals, and final model selection
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Ship real production code inside customer environments — this is hands-on building, not advisory slides
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Deploy and fine-tune open-model LLMs using frameworks like vLLM, SGLang, and TensorRT-LLM (SFT baseline, DPO/RFT a big plus)
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Act as a true partner to your sales counterpart, shaping deal strategy rather than just supporting it
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Build relationships across a customer's org, from engineers to executives, and know how to move a deal forward on both levels
What You Bring
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3+ years in a client-facing AI/ML role — Solutions Architect, Forward-Deployed Engineer, Customer Success Engineer, Applied AI Engineer, Sales Engineer, or an AI/ML-focused SWE with genuine customer exposure