Forward Deployed Engineer, ML

What you will do

• End-to-End Ownership: Proactively engage with client or partner teams in Research, Engineering, Data Science, MLOps, Infrastructure to understand their business and technical requirements. With our internal R&D team in the loop, design specific implementations that you will integrate, optimize, and productionize within the client’s existing or greenfield systems as well as transferring technical knowledge to client teams when applicable.
• Subject Expert: Stay up-to-date with the latest LLM capabilities and implementation patterns, you are learning driven. You will need to explain complex technical details and concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Influence Model Training & Tuning: Represent our core R&D team on-site, leading technical engagement with modern techniques covering all stages of model training using complex, proprietary client data. Ensure architecture is aligned with and optimized for specific constraints (e.g. GPU types, air-gapping).
• Develop Deployment Strategy: Define and execute a global technical strategy for integrating our ML solutions into diverse client environments, ensuring compliance with sector-specific data security standards and performance SLAs. Based on your implementations, build reusable playbooks and libraries that will accelerate yourself and others.
• Building Relationships: Operate autonomously and with agency to build strong relationships with clients, create strategic technical partnerships and drive high-value, referenceable production deployments.
• Serve as Internal Expert: Act as the primary internal consultant, advising product, research, and sales on real-world client infrastructure limitations, performance bottlenecks, and emerging technical standards necessary for product success.

Experience and qualifications

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Experience: 2+ years of experience in a technical, customer facing role such as Forward Deployed Engineer, or as a Software/ML Engineer with consulting experience.
• ML Engineering & Training Expertise: Experience in the Machine Learning lifecycle (training, optimization, deployment), with a proven ability to lead and execute complex model deployments in production environments.
• Forward Deployed/Consulting Background: Proven track record working within or closely alongside client engineering teams to successfully deploy and integrate complex, high-performance software, involving cloud or on-premise ML workloads.
• Technical & MLOps Knowledge: Understanding of modern ML frameworks, programming languages including Python, and deployment technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, cloud services like SageMaker/Vertex AI/Azure AI).
• Value-Driven Influence: Demonstrated ability to influence senior technical leaders and lead engineers, translating complex model performance and system architectures into clear, tangible business value and deployment assurance.

Additional comments

This role is based in San Francisco. We are unable to consider candidates unwilling to be in San Francisco, but we are willing to relocate the right candidate.

We value diversity, equity, and inclusion

At Sonar, we believe that our diversity is our strength. We are a global company that values and respects different backgrounds, perspectives, and cultures. We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute their best. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome all qualified applicants, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

If you need any accommodation, please reach out to us at .

All offers of employment at Sonar are contingent upon the results of a comprehensive background check and reference verification conducted before the start date.

We do not currently support visa candidates in the US.

Applications that are submitted through agencies or third party recruiters will not be considered.