Director, Forward Deployed Engineering (Open Models)

Quick Facts

• Founding Director role leading a Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization for open models across North America.
• Mission: turn open models into production-ready, domain-specific AI delivered through a partner ecosystem (e.g., Nemotron and Cosmos).

Description

Build and lead NVIDIA’s Forward Deployed Engineering organization for open models. Own the technical strategy for post-training, evaluation, agent harness engineering, and inference optimization, and drive three-way engagements among NVIDIA, partners, and end customers to production outcomes. Hire, develop, and scale a technically deep team across North America.

Responsibilities

• Set North America strategy; build the team that delivers custom AI to end customers through NVIDIA’s partner ecosystem.
• Deepen partner relationships and co-lead joint customer engagements with partner engineering and research teams.
• Hire and develop FDE leaders, managers, and senior engineers; set a scalable team structure and growth paths.
• Provide technical direction for post-training, evaluation, harness engineering, and inference optimization; lead the hardest engagements.
• Track the open model, post-training, and agents landscape and bring forward new use cases and partner opportunities proactively.
• Build executive-level alignment across multiple partners and customers; scope engagements, shape SOWs, and deliver high-quality results across many simultaneous efforts.
• Work with Product, Research, and Engineering to translate field learnings back into Nemotron, Cosmos, and NVIDIA’s software stack; keep senior leadership informed and align priorities with sales/partner/solutions leaders.
• Support ecosystem success with reusable recipes, reference pipelines, and playbooks.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 14+ years overall in ML or software engineering / applied AI / FDE / solutions architecture; 8+ years leading technical teams; 5+ years hands-on LLM post-training leading to production.
• Proven experience building and scaling customer-facing technical organizations across multiple locations and time zones, including managing managers or leads.
• Deep technical credibility in post-training: LoRA/PEFT, SFT, synchronous and asynchronous reinforcement learning; plus evaluation, synthetic data, model architectures.
• Strong expertise in agent harness engineering and optimization for LLM and agentic systems.
• Understanding of large-scale distributed training and inference optimization across multi-GPU and multi-node systems.
• Demonstrated ability to scope engagements, shape SOWs, and deliver consistently high-quality results across many engagements.
• Ability to align partners and customers on the same engagement, including executive-level stakeholders.
• Clear communication of complex technical topics to engineers and C-level executives; excellent judgment and prioritization; comfort leading through ambiguity.
• Travel up to 25%.

Benefits

• Base salary range: 320,000 USD – 488,750 USD (based on location, experience, and market benchmarks).
• Equity and benefits eligibility.