Principal/Senior Forward Deployed Engineer
Company websitefal.ai (fal, opens in new tab)
Base salary $180K to $250K
Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in San Francisco, CA
You apply on the employer's own site. Six Figure Work does not handle applications.
- LocationSan Francisco, CA
- WorkplaceWorkplace not stated
- Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
- Last checked (2 h ago) · observed since
About this job
fal is the generative media ecosystem powering the next generation of AI products. We build the infrastructure, tools, and model access that teams need to move from idea to production, and do it at scale without compromise. For developers and enterprises, fal is the foundation that makes generative media not just possible, but practical: a unified platform where high-performance inference, orchestration, and observability come together to unlock new categories of AI-native products.
As generative media reshapes industries across a market projected to grow by hundreds of billions over the next decade, fal is becoming the ecosystem that ambitious teams build on.
About this role:
As a Forward Deployed Engineer on Serverless, you will work directly with enterprise customers to help them deploy, scale, and operationalize their AI workloads on fal. This is a highly technical, customer-facing role where you’ll act as the bridge between Sales, Product and Infrastructure teams.
You’ll join customer calls, deeply understand their architecture and needs, and translate those into actionable implementation plans and product requirements. You will be responsible for unblocking customer deployments, accelerating onboarding, and ensuring enterprise accounts successfully reach production fast.
This is a role for someone who loves solving real-world engineering problems and wants direct ownership over outcomes that drive revenue and product growth.
What you’ll do:
Join enterprise onboarding calls and act as the technical owner for deployments
Help customers integrate their models into fal Serverless (APIs, scaling, observability, deployment workflows)
Debug customer issues end-to-end across frontend, backend, and infra layers
Translate customer feedback into clear product specs, tasks, and engineering priorities
Work closely with Product + Infra to ensure enterprise needs are shipped into the platform
Build custom proofs-of-concept or lightweight integrations to unblock adoption
Identify repeatable patterns across customers and turn them into reusable product features
Improve internal tooling, onboarding flows, and docs based on real customer pain points
Qualifications/Nice-to-haves:
5+ years of engineering background (Proficiency with TypeScript, Python, Postgres, and Next.js)
Experience working with customers in a technical capacity (Solutions Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, DevRel Engineer, or similar)
Comfortable jumping into ambiguous customer problems and finding solutions fast
Ability to understand complex systems and communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
Strong written communication skills (turning customer conversations into actionable specs/tasks)
Experience working across APIs, infrastructure, and cloud environments
High ownership mentality: you take responsibility for customer success end-to-end
Comfort operating in a fast-moving, low-process environmentExperience with serverless platforms, infra products, or developer platforms
Familiarity with observability tooling (logs, metrics, tracing)
Background in distributed systems, Kubernetes, or cloud-native deployment
Experience with AI/ML workloads in production
Experience in generative AI inference, training and compute space strongly preferred
Experience writing documentation, onboarding guides, or customer playbooks
What we offer at fal:
Interesting and challenging work
A lot of learning and growth opportunities
Health, dental, and vision insurance (US)
Regular team events and offsites
U.S. EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY INFORMATION:
fal provides equal employment opportunities to applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other classification protected by applicable law.
Source: fal on Ashby · View original posting (opens in new tab)
Pay in context
This role's base floor ($180,000) is above 41% of the 1,503 Data & ML roles in California listed on this site; 55 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $187,000; the middle half runs from $158,941 to $229,900.
Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 7, 2026.
This listingPrincipal/Senior Forward Deployed Engineer$180K to $250K
Security Engineer, Detection and Response$180K to $250K
Senior Software Engineer, Product$180K to $250K
Software Engineer, Distributed Systems$180K to $250K
Capital Markets & Compute Strategy$180K to $220K
Strategic Finance$180K to $220K
Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Network Infrastructure$180K to $250K
Chart as a table
| Role | Published base |
|---|---|
| Principal/Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (this listing) | $180K - $250K |
| Security Engineer, Detection and Response | $180K - $250K |
| Senior Software Engineer, Product | $180K - $250K |
| Software Engineer, Distributed Systems | $180K - $250K |
| Capital Markets & Compute Strategy | $180K - $220K |
| Strategic Finance | $180K - $220K |
| Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Network Infrastructure | $180K - $250K |
Observed changes
- Began meeting the published-salary criteria
- First observed on the employer's board
- fields changed
- Observed since
- Employer-stated posting date
- 2026-10-09
Where this pay comes from
Location as the employer wrote it: San Francisco
USD 180,000 – 250,000 · 1 YEAR · Salary
- Method
- Structured pay field published by the employer
- Checked
- Rule set
- us-base-v2
The employer's job board publishes this pay as a dedicated data field. We read the field directly; no interpretation was needed.
What we verified
- The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
- The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
- The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.
We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.
