Forward Deployed Engineer
Luma AI
Software Engineering
San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA
USD 170k-290k / year
Posted on May 19, 2026
Forward Deployed Engineer
SF Bay Area, CA
Product Engineering
Hybrid
Full-time
About Luma
A new class of intelligence is emerging, systems that understand and generate the world across video, images, audio, and language. Building multimodal AGI is not just a research problem. It’s a full-stack engineering problem, spanning training systems, inference, product architecture, and the tight feedback loops between them.
When a new technological wave begins, the highest leverage place to be is at the foundation. Not at a startup wrapping someone else’s API. At the company building the models themselves.
The frontier is not incremental improvement. These models are replacing entire categories of software and enabling entirely new ones.
At Luma, we are:
- A leading multimodal AI research lab, having built one of the world’s strongest video generation models (Ray-3.14).
- Pushing beyond video toward the next generation of multimodal general intelligence models.
- Operating at a scale few companies can match, with the compute and resources to support frontier research ($900M Series C).
- Focused on the creative domain, where multimodal systems can have immediate real-world impact.
- Shipping tightly integrated products that turn research breakthroughs into tools creators actually use.
We’re still early. The playbook is not written. A single exceptional engineer can reshape how the company operates.
Where You Come In
Forward Deployed Engineers turn what our models can do into things customers actually rely on. You embed with a customer, learn their workflow, define the problem with them, and build the system that solves it — in production, with their data, with their constraints. You own the relationship and the code. When something is missing in our platform, you build around it. When the same gap shows up across customers, you work with R&D to turn that pattern into product. This is engineering at the edge, where ambiguity is the default and "what should we build?" is yours to answer.
This role is built for people who have already operated as the single point of ownership for a hard problem — and want to keep doing that, with much better tools.
You may have been:
- A technical founder — you built the product, talked to the first customers, made the calls, and shipped. You miss the pace and the autonomy more than you miss running a company.
- An engineer who became the customer's engineer — the one who flew out, sat in their office, and rebuilt their workflow because the standard product didn't fit.
- A consultant or architect who codes for real — you didn't just diagram the system, you wrote it.
- A builder with a customer instinct — strong technical foundation, a track record of personal projects with real users, and a pattern of identifying problems and moving on them without waiting.
What ties these together: you've made the call yourself, you've shipped against ambiguity, and you know the difference between "delivered" and "actually used."
What You’ll Do
- Work directly with customers to understand their workflows, constraints, and goals.
- Define the problem — there is no PRD waiting for you.
- Build production systems on Luma's APIs, models, and internal tools.
- Prototype, ship, iterate, and maintain systems that customers depend on inside of real environments with real data.
- Own projects end-to-end, from first conversation to deployed system.
- Identify the patterns worth productizing and feed them back to platform and R&D.
Raise the Bar
FDEs leverage AI to accelerate implementation, but the core of the role is engineering judgment — knowing what to build, how to structure it, and how to make it work reliably in messy real-world environments. Breadth, product intuition, and customer empathy matter more here than narrow specialization. We're not looking for unicorns; we're looking for builders who can hold all three.
Who You Are:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
- 2+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Strong proficiency in at least one general-purpose language (Python, TypeScript, Go, or similar)
- Experience building and shipping software end-to-end
- Ability to work across the stack and learn unfamiliar systems quickly
- Ability and interest to travel as needed to client sites
What Sets You Apart
- A track record of shipping real systems with real users, not just completing assigned tasks.
- High agency and strong prioritization skills — you can figure out the core problem and move.
- Comfort defining your own path when there isn't one.
- Evidence of working directly with customers or users, and translating what you heard into what you built.
- Clear communication, including explaining a technical decision to a non-technical stakeholder.
Compensation
The base pay range for this role is $170,000 – $290,000 per year.
About Luma
Luma’s mission is to build unified general intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world.
We believe that multimodality is critical for intelligence. To go beyond language models and build more aware, capable and useful systems, the next step function change will come from vision. So, we are working on training and scaling up multimodal foundation models for systems that can see and understand, show and explain, and eventually interact with our world to effect change.
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Req ID: R100156
