Director, Forward Deployed Engineering, Open Models

What you'll do

• Set the strategy for delivering custom AI to end customers through NVIDIA’s partner ecosystem.
• Hire and develop a North American team of FDE leads, managers, and senior engineers.
• Define the technical direction for post-training, evaluation, harness engineering, and inference optimization.
• Build and manage trusted relationships with leaders at partner and end-customer companies.
• Create reusable recipes, reference pipelines, and playbooks to help partners scale domain-specific AI.
• Translate field insights from customers and partners back into NVIDIA’s model research and software stack.
• Align priorities and resources with sales, partner, and solutions leaders to drive production outcomes.
• Track and report on key metrics including partner adoption, production deployment, and public testimonials.

What we're looking for

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Experience in ML, software engineering, applied AI, FDE, or solutions architecture.
• 8+ years of experience leading technical teams.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience with LLM post-training with models taken to production.
• Deep technical credibility in post-training (LoRA/PEFT, SFT, RL), model architectures, synthetic data, evaluation, and agent harness engineering.
• Understanding of large-scale distributed training and inference performance optimization across multi-GPU and multi-node systems.
• Proven ability to build alignment across multiple partners and customers, including at the executive level.
• Experience building and scaling an FDE, applied research, or solutions organization from an early stage (preferred).