Forward Deployed Engineer
Goodfire
CA$200,000 - CA$325,000 / year
Need a reasonable accommodation to apply or interview? Contact us.
JobMinglr uses automated technology to recommend jobs based on profile information and job preferences. Match Score does not determine eligibility for a position, prevent a user from viewing or applying to a job, or make hiring decisions on behalf of an employer.
Description
About Goodfire
Goodfire is an AI interpretability research lab. We build interpretability agents and infrastructure to understand, monitor, and align AI models.
We believe that AI is the most consequential technology of our time. Yet AI models are trained by trial and error today, with limited understanding of what drives their behavior. Our goal is to advance the research and technology needed to fully understand and align AI so humanity can trust superintelligence.
Goodfire is a public benefit corporation founded by researchers who helped pioneer the field of interpretability at OpenAI and Google DeepMind. We are headquartered in San Francisco and have raised over $200M from leading investors including Lightspeed, Menlo, and B Capital.
About the role
We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to be the technical backbone of our customer engagements, the person who takes our interpretability platform and makes it work inside a partner's environment, end-to-end. This role demands strong engineering capability, the ability to learn new domains fast, the creativity to design solutions under real-world constraints, and the comfort to operate directly alongside customer engineering and research teams.
This is a hands-on, high-ownership role where you will be forward-deployed with our most strategic partners: writing production code, building integrations, running pilots, and owning technical delivery day-to-day.
This role turns frontier research into deployed reality. You will typically be working with deeply technical partners - Heads of AI, research teams, ML platform teams - across Life Sciences, Robotics and Vision, Language and Reasoning models, or new verticals, helping them integrate our platform into their model training stack.
Key responsibilities
- Own technical delivery for partner engagements: build production-grade integrations of Goodfire's platform into customer environments — from API integrations and custom pipelines to internal tooling and evaluation workflows
- Run pilots that prove value fast: design and execute creative, short-timeline pilots that demonstrate the platform's impact, often in parallel with or ahead of longer-term solution scoping
- Embed with partner engineering teams: serve as the day-to-day technical point of contact, going deep in their codebase, understanding their infrastructure, and building trust through competence
- Compound learnings across engagements: bring field insights back to the platform and research teams, identify repeatable patterns, and build shared tooling and playbooks that scale the Field Team
- Bridge research and production: take novel interpretability methods from the Foundational Team and figure out how to make them work reliably in a partner's stack — this means being comfortable reading papers, prototyping new techniques, and hardening them for production use
What you’ll bring
Required experience
- Strong software engineering skills with production experience in Python and modern ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX).
- Ability to work across research and engineering boundaries - you can understand a new technique and figure out how to ship it.
- Scrappiness, willingness to persist in ambiguity, ability to learn quickly, and a generalist "can-do" mindset.
- Strong communication skills - you can explain technical tradeoffs clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
Preferred qualifications
- Technical degree or equivalent professional experience within AI, ML, or a related field.
- Experience in a forward-deployed, solutions, or customer-facing engineering role. Former technical founders encouraged to apply.
- Track record of excellence in a high-growth startup or frontier AI lab.
- Experience with large language models, including fine-tuning, evaluation frameworks, or agent development.
- Familiarity with interpretability, mechanistic interpretability, or model internals (sparse autoencoders, feature steering, etc.).
Our values
Goodfire is looking for individuals who embody our values and share our deep commitment to making interpretability accessible. We are building a team first and foremost.
Put mission and team first
All we do is in service of our mission. We trust each other, deeply care about the success of the organization, and choose to put our team above ourselves.
Improve constantly
We are constantly looking to improve every piece of the business. We proactively critique ourselves and others in a kind and thoughtful way that translates to practical improvements in the organization. We are pragmatic and consistently implement the obvious fixes that work.
Take ownership and initiative
There are no bystanders here. We proactively identify problems and take full responsibility over getting a strong result. We are self-driven, own our mistakes, and feel deep responsibility over what we’re building.
Action today
We have a small amount of time to do something incredibly hard and meaningful. The pace and intensity of the organization is high. If we can take action today or tomorrow, we will choose to do it today.
Where we work
We are hiring for this position in our San Francisco HQ. We are in person 5 days a week, with one company-wide remote week per month.
What we offer
This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.
The expected salary range for this position is $200,000 - $325,000 USD.
Most importantly, you'll have the opportunity to join a vital mission at an important point in its trajectory — we are developing groundbreaking technology with a world-class team on the critical path to ensuring a safe and beneficial future for humanity. If you want to do your life’s work with us, even if you believe you do not meet every single requirement, apply now.
Benefits
- $325,000 USD. Most importantly, you'll have the opportunity to join a vital mission at an important point in its trajectory
- we are developing groundbreaking technology with a world-class team on the critical path to ensuring a safe and beneficial future for humanity. If you want to do your life’s work with us, even if you believe you do not meet every single requirement,
About this role
Goodfire is an AI interpretability research lab working to make AI systems understandable and trustworthy. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'd be the technical lead embedding directly with their most strategic partners—major AI labs and companies across life sciences, robotics, vision, and language models—to integrate Goodfire's interpretability platform into their model training workflows. This is a hands-on role where you own the full technical delivery: writing production code, designing integrations, running pilots, and serving as the day-to-day engineering point of contact for partners' research and ML platform teams.
The work sits at the intersection of frontier research and real-world deployment. You'd take novel interpretability methods from Goodfire's research team, figure out how to make them work reliably in a partner's stack, and bring field insights back to improve the platform itself. This demands strong Python and ML framework skills (PyTorch, JAX), the ability to move fluidly between research and engineering, and genuine comfort with ambiguity and rapid learning. You'll need to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, and operate with high ownership and scrappiness.
The role is based in San Francisco with in-person work five days a week (one remote week per month). Preferred experience includes prior work in customer-facing or forward-deployed engineering, familiarity with LLMs or interpretability techniques, or a background in a high-growth startup or frontier AI lab. The salary range is $200,000–$325,000 with equity and competitive benefits.
This role's local market on JobMinglr
Pay for this role
$200,000 to $325,000 per year
That is the employer's posted range, and where you land in it is usually decided in one conversation. Before that conversation, run the numbers: analyze an offer for this role.
Before you apply, worth reading
How JobMinglr reads this job
Every listing here is scored against your profile before you apply: skills overlap, experience level, location and work arrangement, each weighted and explained. You see the score and the reasons, not just a list. How the matching works.