Manager, Solutions Architect

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $300M Series E , backed by investors including BOND, IVP, Spark Capital, Greylock, and Conviction. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE As Manager (Player & Coach) of the Solution Architect team, you will lead and mentor a team of Solution Architects who will partner closely with Sales and customers to translate business needs into technical solutions, run technical discovery, and guide repeatable deployments and proofs of value for customers. Applying both hands-on technical ownership and managerial leadership, you will guide your team through the processes of owning discovery calls, demos, technical scoping and driving POC’s through to execution as well as designing, deploying, and managing high performance, low latency AI applications on Baseten’s platform. You will also partner with product, infrastructure, and other customer engineering teams to ensure that large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI systems deliver best-in-class performance, reliability, and cost efficiency in production environments. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Take a look at these blog posts written by members of our Forward Deployed Engineering team: Forward Deployed Engineering on the frontier of AI The fastest, most accurate Whisper transcription Deploy production-ready model servers from Docker images Deploy custom ComfyUI workflows as APIs RESPONSIBILITIES Leadership Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Solution Architects, providing guidance on technical direction, project execution, and professional development. Set clear goals and ensure timely, high-quality delivery across multiple customer-facing projects involving LLM deployment and inference optimization. Collaborate with leadership to align team priorities with company and customer goals, balancing short-term delivery, widely varying customer priorities, and long-term technical initiatives. Player-coach – While much of this role will be leading the team, you will also be expected to be a key driver on strategic product initiatives and customer engagements. The best managers derive credibility from being able to be hands-on when needed. Team Management - Lead a team of Solution Architects who will: Partner with sales on customer discovery calls (most often second calls, occasionally first calls for large accounts). Lead demos and technical scoping to align on success criteria, architecture, and deployment approach. Own benchmarking and repeatable deployments, including handling standard deployment patterns and configurations across many modalities – LLMs, embeddings, image and video generation, VoiceAI, etc. Advising on tradeoffs like H100s vs B200s and latency-optimized vs throughput-optimized setups. Driving consistent “playbook” style deployments for common models and use cases. Become a power user of different runtimes such as vllm, sglang, and TRT-LMM and all the common configurations and tradeoffs between them Drive POC and project execution, including: Scoping POCs and keeping stakeholders aligned on timeline, deliverables, and next steps. Acting as the “ringleader” or project manager for POCs. Pulling in Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) support when deeper or more complex technical work is needed. REQUIREMENTS: AI/ML background and the ability to credibly discuss AI/ML topics with technical stakeholders. 4+ years of professional Solution Architecture/Solutions Engineering experience, including 1+ year in a leadership or mentorship capacity. Strong customer-facing communication skills, including the ability to run structured discovery and clarify ambiguous requirements. Technical depth to scope solutions, without needing to write production code. Ability to script and prototype as needed, including comfort “vibe coding” to move quickly in technical workflows. NICE TO HAVE: Experience running or supporting benchmarks for ML inference deployments. Familiarity with infrastructure tradeoffs relevant to inference performance and cost (for example GPU selection and latency versus throughput tuning). Experience serving as a cross-functional technical lead for customer POCs, including coordination across Sales and Engineering. Professional Software engineering experience BENEFITS Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity. 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!) Paid parental leave Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot Company-facilitated 401(k)