Forward Deployment Engineering Manager

Details

Nebius is building a full-stack AI cloud platform for developers and enterprises, supporting workloads from data and model training through production deployment. The platform includes GPU clusters, inference runtimes, agent development environments, and data pipelines. Nebius is headquartered in Amsterdam and has R&D hubs across Europe, the UK, North America, and Israel.

The Manager of Forward Deployed Engineering will lead a team of Forward Deployed Engineers working at the intersection of solution architecture and hands-on engineering. The role is responsible for setting technical standards, developing the team's engineering capabilities, and ensuring that integrations, reference architectures, and proofs of concept are production-quality and strategically sound. The manager will remain technically engaged by reviewing architectures, resolving complex scoping issues, and occasionally prototyping solutions.

The role can be performed remotely from the United States.

Responsibilities

People and Team Leadership

• Hire, develop, and retain Forward Deployed Engineers across agentic, inference, infrastructure, and data focus areas.
• Set expectations for technical quality and partner engagement, and coach engineers toward those standards.
• Run structured 1:1s, provide direct and actionable feedback, and support the growth of each team member.
• Build a culture that balances speed with high-quality engineering.
• Partner with Recruiting to define FDE hiring requirements and source candidates from the AI builder community.

Technical Oversight and Architecture

• Review and improve integration architectures, proofs of concept, reference patterns, and partner scoping assessments.
• Serve as a technical escalation point for complex partner engagements and provide hands-on support when needed.
• Maintain high standards for the reference architecture library.
• Stay current with the AI tooling ecosystem and guide the team's technical judgment.

Ecosystem Presence

• Represent Nebius at hackathons, open-source communities, and technical events.
• Build public demos, reference architectures, and integrations that establish Nebius as a platform for serious AI builders.
• Track new developments in the AI tooling ecosystem and assess their relevance to the Nebius stack.

Platform Focus Areas

Depending on background and mutual fit, the role may focus on one or more of the following areas:

• Agentic: Agent frameworks, memory systems, tool integration, orchestration, MCP, and guardrails.
• Managed inference: Inference runtimes, model serving, optimization tooling, speculative decoding, and KV-cache routing.
• IaaS and managed infrastructure: Cloud-native integrations, GPU orchestration, and enterprise platform connectors.
• Data: Vector databases, retrieval systems, RAG architectures, data pipeline integrations, and synthetic data tooling.

Partner and Internal Stakeholder Engagement

• Engage directly with senior partner engineering leaders and founding CTOs.
• Translate field observations into actionable product requirements for Nebius platform teams.
• Represent the FDE function in platform planning discussions as the technical voice of ecosystem integration.
• Work with ISV, SI, and field teams to scale solution adoption and drive revenue once integrations are ready.

Requirements

• 8+ years of hands-on engineering experience in AI application development, ML systems, or AI infrastructure.
• 2+ years of experience managing or leading an engineering team, with a track record of developing technical talent.
• Deep working knowledge of the AI developer stack, including LLM APIs, inference runtimes, orchestration frameworks, vector databases, RAG architectures, and agentic pipelines.
• Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, or equivalent.
• Strong Python programming skills and the ability to prototype end-to-end AI systems quickly.
• Experience defining reference architectures and technical patterns.
• Experience shipping meaningful solutions under time pressure.
• Experience building integrations across APIs and developer platforms.
• Ability to work across external partner engineering teams and internal product and engineering teams.
• Strong technical communication skills, including the ability to explain architecture decisions and integration findings to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with inference frameworks and optimization, including vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, speculative decoding, quantization, batching, and KV-cache routing.
• Familiarity with NVIDIA software such as CUDA, TensorRT, or NeMo.
• Experience with multimodal AI models, including vision-language, speech, or structured-data models.
• Recent success in major AI hackathons.
• Experience as a developer advocate, solutions engineer, or technical partner manager at an AI platform or developer tooling company.
• Experience as an early engineer at an AI startup.
• Open-source projects or public demos with meaningful community adoption.
• Proficiency with Docker, Kubernetes, and Git.

Preferred Technical Stack

• Language: Python
• ML frameworks: vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, Transformers, OpenAI SDKs, and Anthropic SDKs
• Agentic frameworks: LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, smolagents, or equivalent
• Vector databases: Qdrant, Weaviate, Milvus, and pgvector
• API and web frameworks: FastAPI and Flask
• DevOps: Kubernetes, Docker, and Git
• Cloud platforms: AWS, GCP, and Azure

Benefits

• 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and families.
• 401(k) plan with up to a 4% company match and immediate vesting.
• 20 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers and 12 weeks for secondary caregivers.
• Remote work reimbursement of up to $85 per month for mobile and internet.
• Company-paid short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance.
• Career growth and learning opportunities.
• Flexibility and ownership.
• Collaborative and innovative culture.
• Opportunity to work on impactful AI projects.
• International environment and talented teams.

Compensation

Starting base compensation range: $225,800–$281,000 USD. Actual compensation depends on job-related factors, including experience, skills, qualifications, hiring level, and geographic location.

Nebius is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants must be authorized to work in the country in which they apply and must provide proof of employment eligibility. Accommodations are available during the application process.