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Forward Deployed Inference Engineer

Tensordyne - Munich, Bavaria, Germany - In-office - posted 2026-10-05

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Tensordyne is building a new class of AI inference system designed for high-performance, power-efficient deployment of demanding generative AI workloads. The platform combines purpose-built silicon, optimized AI math, scale-up networking, and memory architecture into a tightly integrated system for large-scale AI inference, serving hyperscalers, frontier model developers, enterprises, and infrastructure partners. As the company moves from system development into silicon bring-up, customer validation, beta deployments, and production rollout, it is building a technical customer organization that bridges engineering teams and deploying companies. The Forward Deployed Inference Engineer combines deep AI systems expertise with strong customer instincts. You will own the path from a customer workload or model request to a technical result—optimized models running successfully on Tensordyne hardware and software. The role sits at the intersection of model architecture, inference performance, systems optimization, developer tooling, and customer deployment, working hands-on with engineering while acting as a technical bridge to Product, BizDev, Sales, and customers. Key responsibilities: - Turn customer workloads into fast, credible performance answers through profiling and benchmarking. Define relevant KPIs, compare against competitive baselines, and keep evaluation methodology current with external benchmarks. - Model enablement and optimization: convert and bring up customer models on the Tensordyne stack, validate numerical quality, identify performance bottlenecks, and work with compiler, runtime, kernel, and system teams to improve results. - Deployment and forward engineering: work directly with customers and partners on technical PoCs, integration, deployment, and debugging; translate requirements into measurable acceptance criteria for quality, latency, throughput, and other KPIs. - Track profiling-to-hardware accuracy by continuously comparing profiling/simulation results with actual hardware deployments, explain material gaps, and flag missing capabilities in compiler, SDK, inference server, KV-cache management, or adjacent systems. - Turn repeated customer-specific learnings into reusable tooling, documentation, benchmarks, or product improvements. REQUIREMENTS: - Strong hands-on experience with AI models and inference systems, especially dense and MoE LLMs (Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen, GPT-OSS, Kimi, GLM), and VLM, speech, and diffusion models. - Strong Python and PyTorch skills and the ability to understand and modify model code. - Experience profiling, benchmarking, or optimizing model inference and reasoning about latency, throughput, memory, and utilization. - Strong problem-solving and communication skills, with the ability to drive ambiguous technical problems across team boundaries. - Proficiency in using AI-powered developer tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor). STRONG PLUSES: - Experience with LLM serving and deployment stacks such as vLLM, SGLang, or similar systems. - Experience working directly with customers or external technical partners. - Experience bringing models up on new accelerators or non-standard hardware, including performance debugging across framework/runtime/hardware boundaries. - Practical experience with production inference techniques or environments such as quantization, distributed inference, or Kubernetes. - Experience navigating and contributing to Rust codebases.

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