Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Model Customization and Optimization)

As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Senior FDE) on the Custom Model and Optimization team, you are the technical lead embedded inside a strategic customer, accountable for building, optimizing, and running the custom generative AI models at the heart of their business. You set the technical direction for model customization and optimization engagements, deciding what to build, how to measure it, and how it reaches production. You combine the technical depth of an AWS senior engineer with the urgency of a startup builder, using your judgment and ownership to deliver measurable business outcomes in quality, latency, and cost.

Senior FDEs work on the hardest problems where models meet systems: building domain foundation models, post-training frontier-scale open-weight models with reinforcement learning, and migrating large training and inference workloads onto AWS Trainium. They take on problems where the business problem itself is ambiguous, define the approach, and break it into workstreams others can own. They make long-term architectural trade-offs, balance customer urgency against sustainable design, and are trusted by customer engineering leadership as a technical peer. They raise the bar for the team through design reviews, code reviews, mentorship, and hiring, and they shape how AWS builds.

Basic qualifications

• 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
• 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
• 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