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Baseten powers mission-critical inference for leading AI companies including Cursor, Notion, Abridge, and Writer. The company recently raised $1.5B in Series F funding and is building the platform engineers rely on to ship AI products at scale.
The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team is Baseten's technical swat team—deeply technical, customer-focused, and fast-moving. They tackle the hardest inference problems for strategic customers: novel architectures, extreme scale, tight latency budgets. This Technical Program Manager role will build the operating system that enables this fast-growing team to stay focused on hard problems rather than coordination overhead.
Key responsibilities include:
- Run the priority account cadence: own the operating rhythm for top accounts with daily hot-account check-ins, weekly leadership reviews, and account prioritization. Goal is zero surprise escalations to executives.
- Make cross-team connections work: ensure clear ownership, cadence, and SLAs across FDE, Solutions Architecture, Sales, Product, Engineering (inference/infra), capacity, and on-call. Manage account transitions, escalation tracking, and customer-pattern feedback into product roadmap.
- Drive cross-team programs for largest customers: coordinate multi-team efforts such as dedicated-capacity rollouts, cluster migrations, capacity reservations, and major customer launches.
- Reduce toil and protect platform time: track where engineering time goes (incidents, manual work, after-hours pages) and work with engineering leads to remove obstacles so FDEs retain 30% of time for platform work.
- Own metrics and reporting: build and report scorecard on account health, response times, toil, load per engineer, and team health to leadership.
- Help scale the team: drive new-hire enablement, certification programs, account load balancing, runbook coverage, and partner with recruiting on hiring operations.
- Manage risk and dependencies: maintain visibility of cross-team dependencies and risks; surface early, drive mitigation, keep leadership informed.
- Communicate across levels: translate between deeply technical teams and senior leadership; run effective program reviews and write crisp statuses for fast decision-making.
This is a high-visibility role with direct exposure to Baseten's largest customers and company leadership. You'll shape how a new kind of engineering team operates in the AI industry.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years as a TPM (or engineer-turned-TPM) on infrastructure, cloud, or customer-facing technical programs
- Technical depth: comfortable with ML infra systems, Kubernetes, GPUs, distributed systems; able to follow incident channels or design docs without translation. LLM inference experience is a strong plus.
- Experience running programs across many teams without formal authority
- Calm under escalation: bring structure to chaos and close the loop
- Clear, concise writing for both engineers and executives
- High ownership; prefer fixing processes to working around them
NICE-TO-HAVES:
- Experience with AI/ML infra stack
- Background in solutions engineering, SRE, or forward-deployed teams
