Forward Deployed Machine Learning Engineer

Workplace
Remote
Compensation
$170k – $270k + equity

About this role

We are looking for a Forward Deployed Machine Learning Engineer with 3+ years of experience to be the first MLE dedicated to Protege's Benchmarks and Evaluations vertical. You'll work directly with the GM and researchers to build the technical foundation for AI model evaluation — a critical capability at one of the most exciting data infrastructure companies in AI, backed by a16z, CRV, and others.

What will you be doing?

Partner with the GM and early customers to define, design, and build benchmarks and evals across different domains and modalities

Build and own the backend infrastructure: data pipelines, execution environments, storage, and orchestration

Stand up sandboxed environments for agentic evals requiring tools, code execution, or multi-step tasks

Own the engineering portion of customer engagements end to end

Identify repeatable eval patterns and infrastructure gaps to drive product opportunities

Key Requirements

4+ years of engineering experience with hands-on ML model evaluation work

Prior ownership of backend and infrastructure (data pipelines, execution environments)

Experience building benchmarks, evals, or human data pipelines for LLMs (strongly preferred)

High ambiguity tolerance and a strong bias to action in fast-moving environments

Strong written communication skills for customer-facing and cross-functional work

What happens next

Skip the application pile. I get you in front of the people who decide.

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

A meeting lands on your calendar

When the company wants to meet, I get the call on your calendar. You just show up.

Know someone who'd be great for this?