Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

Palo Alto Office Until 9/7/2026 5+ years exp First posted June 17, 2026 Last posted July 9, 2026
Job description

This role requires you to be in our San Francisco office (Atherton near Palo Alto).


The Role
You'll deliver our AI platform the world's leading semiconductor and consumer electronics companies, and collaborate with them to develop new features. (This is not an exaggeration.)

 

About Voltai
Voltai is developing models and agents to evaluate, design, and interact with hardware and electronic systems.

 

The Team
We're hackers, researchers, and operators obsessed with building AI for electronic systems and semiconductors. Our team includes former Stanford professors, SAIL researchers, Olympiad medalists, and executives from Synopsys, GlobalFoundries, and Cadence. Despite the name drops, we care far more about execution than titles.

We're backed by Stanford, Sequoia, and leadership at Google, AMD, Broadcom and more. In other words, we have deep, deep access to the industry.

 

What You'll Do

  • Own customer deployments at offices across the SF Bay Area, Cupertino, and Santa Clara.

  • Develop features specific to customer workflows and port features from our cloud product to on-prem environments inside some of the most locked-down infrastructure on the planet.

  • Manage cloud deployments across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OpenShift: standing them up, keeping them healthy, debugging them when they're not.

  • Learn about hardware design. Previous experience is not expected, but you should be eager to familiarize yourself with how hardware is developed at a high-level.

 

What We're Seeking For

  • We care about how you think, not how you keyword-match

  • 5+ years in backend engineering, full-stack development, or infrastructure/DevOps: internships and teaching assistantships don't count

  • Familiarity with agent development and RAG

  • Strong systems design and debugging instincts

  • Comfortable with the Docker ecosystem, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP), and IaC tools

  • Willingness to travel, mostly in California

 

Bonus Points For

  • On-prem deployment experience in enterprise or air-gapped environments

  • Prior field engineering, solutions engineering, or customer-facing technical roles

  • Experience in EDA, semiconductor, or hardware-adjacent software environments

 

Our AI Bullshit Meter

We are very good at catching people who use AI to exaggerate their abilities whether on paper or during interviews. Please don't waste our time.

 

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About this role

Summary

Develop and deploy AI systems for hardware companies; manage cloud and on-prem environments.

Job title

Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

Experience level

5+ years

Minimum experience

5+ years exp

Industry

software

Location requirements

In-office in Palo Alto, California; travel within California allowed

Salary

Not specified

Management role

No

Skills & keywords

Required skills

cloud infrastructuredocker ecosystemsystem designdebuggingIaC tools

Preferred skills

on-prem deploymentfield engineeringhardware-adjacent software

Specializations

cloud deploymentssystem designbackend engineeringDevOpshardware
Locations

Structured locations inferred from the posting.

Palo Alto, CA, USA

On-site City