Forward Deployed Engineer

TLDR

LiteLLM is an open-source LLM Gateway with 28K+ stars on GitHub and trusted by companies like NASA, Rocket Money, Samsara, Lemonade, and Adobe. We’re rapidly expanding and seeking a performance engineer to help scale the platform to handle 5K RPS (Requests per second). We’re based in San Francisco.

What is LiteLLM

LiteLLM provides an open source Python SDK and Python FastAPI Server that allows calling 100+ LLM APIs (Bedrock, Azure, OpenAI, VertexAI, Cohere, Anthropic) in the OpenAI format

We just hit $2.5M ARR and have raised a $1.6M seed round from Y Combinator, Gravity Fund and Pioneer Fund. You can find more information on our website, Github and Technical Documentation.

About the Role

We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with our key customers, helping them successfully deploy and scale LiteLLM in production. You'll work directly at customer sites (remotely), troubleshooting complex technical issues, optimizing their infrastructure, and ensuring they extract maximum value from the platform.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives in dynamic, customer-facing environments, enjoys solving production-level challenges in real-time, and can translate customer needs into actionable product improvements.

Responsibilities

• Deploy and configure LiteLLM in customer environments, ensuring optimal performance and reliability
• Diagnose and resolve complex technical issues across the full stack—from infrastructure and backend to frontend integrations
• Work remotely with customers during critical implementations, migrations, or scaling initiatives
• Reproduce customer issues in their specific environments and create detailed technical reports for engineering
• Build custom integrations, scripts, or tooling to meet unique customer requirements
• Submit pull requests for bug fixes, feature enhancements, documentation improvements, and configuration optimizations
• Act as the technical voice of the customer—gathering feedback, identifying patterns, and advocating for product improvements
• Maintain close collaboration with product engineering to ensure customer-reported issues are resolved and communicated back effectively
• Develop and maintain customer-facing technical documentation, deployment guides, and best practices
• Own customer relationships from a technical perspective, building trust through deep expertise and responsiveness

Why Work At LiteLLM?

• You thrive working directly with customers at a fast-growing startup—scoping complex technical challenges, leading implementation discussions, and driving them to production success
• You love working closely with developers (30K+ Github stars) and being at the intersection of product and customer
• You want to work hard (966 work culture) and move fast in a high-impact role
• You want to see firsthand how AI is transforming businesses—our customers run ALL their LLM calls through LiteLLM
• You enjoy the autonomy and variety of working across multiple customer environments and technical stacks

1. Intro call - 30 mins.
2. Take-Home Exercise - You'll work with real customer tickets to demonstrate your troubleshooting approach. This exercise evaluates your ability to respond to customer issues, debug effectively, and quickly set up LiteLLM to reproduce reported problems.
3. 3-Day Onsite - You'll join us in person to work directly with our team. This collaborative period allows us to assess how you support customers in real-time and how well we work together.