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Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Model Customization and Optimization)

Amazon· Amazon Web Services, Inc.
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Hybrid (Boston, MA), Hybrid (Seattle, WA), Hybrid (Arlington, VA), Hybrid (New York, NY), Hybrid (East Palo Alto, CA)$168.1k - $227.4kFull-timePosted yesterday

About the role

Technical lead embedded inside a strategic customer responsible for building, optimizing, and running custom generative AI models. Defines customization strategies, architectures, and productionization plans to achieve targeted quality, latency, and cost, while mentoring teams and influencing AWS roadmaps.

Responsibilities

  • Lead the technical engagement: embed with the customer as the technical lead for their model customization and optimization program, spanning multiple workstreams. Partner with customer engineering and product leadership to frame the business problem, define success metrics and the evaluation bar, and set technical roadmap that moves from proof of value to production. Communicate trade-offs, risks, and results clearly to executives and engineers alike. Requires up to 25% travel.
  • Define the customization strategy: decide the right path to targets — prompting, distillation, supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, reinforcement learning (including RL with verifiable rewards and multi-turn agentic RL), continued pre-training, task-specific adapters, or building a domain foundation model. Own data strategy, synthetic data generation, and evaluation methodology and drive them to production.
  • Architect training and inference systems at scale: design distributed training and RL post-training systems for large dense and mixture-of-experts models using frameworks such as PyTorch FSDP2, Megatron-LM, Miles, and verl, and production inference architectures using engines such as SGLang and vLLM. Architect RL interaction harnesses using frameworks such as NeMo Gym and OpenEnv, defining how agent workflows, tools, environments, and reward functions connect to training and evaluation.
  • Lead optimization on AWS AI chips: lead migrations of training and inference workloads to AWS Trainium using the AWS Neuron SDK. Diagnose performance and accuracy-parity gaps against GPU baselines, direct kernel-level optimization where it matters, and work with AWS Neuron and service teams to close capability gaps.
  • Lead, mentor, and raise the bar: provide technical leadership to a team of FDEs and scientists on the engagement, breaking ambiguous problems into well-scoped workstreams and unblocking others. Mentor FDE IIs on model systems design and production ownership. Lead design reviews, provide high-judgment code review, and actively participate in hiring and interviewing.
  • Multiply impact across AWS: identify patterns across engagements and turn them into reusable fine-tuning recipes, evaluation frameworks, benchmarking tools, and reference architectures adopted by other teams. Influence roadmaps of AWS services with field evidence.
  • Oversee engagement execution: own the delivery plan, set milestones, track progress against deadlines, and ensure the quality and completeness of all deliverables.
  • Team About the team: The Custom Models & Optimization team, part of the AWS Forward Deployed Engineering team, partners with enterprises, AI-native startups, and foundation model providers to build, customize, and optimize generative AI models at scale.

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
  • 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language
  • 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems
  • Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team
  • Hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, or optimizing deep learning models
  • Experience communicating technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences, including senior leadership

Skills

Required:Technical leadershipDeep learning model training and fine-tuningDistributed training and RL systems

Benefits

  • Health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line)
  • 401(k) matching
  • paid time off
  • parential leave
  • Disability and other benefits as listed in Amazon benefits page
Last updated Oct 25, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Amazon

Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates

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