Forward Deployed Engineer

About Lyra

Lyra started with a simple act. A group of engineers helped their roommates build a product from scratch. Six weeks later that product launched, and shortly after it raised over $2M pre-seed. That company was Paraform (now a $65M Series B), and that moment is the reason Lyra exists.

Today we're 80+ engineers across Australia who have shipped for 75+ Silicon Valley startups backed by YC, a16z and Sequoia. Now we're going all in on FDE as a service: AI infrastructure companies and fast-growing AI startups bring us in to get their platform live inside their customers' stacks, and our Forward Deployed Engineers make it happen.

About the Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Lyra, you're the engineer a customer meets when they need something real shipped on AI infrastructure. You embed with a customer's team, scope the work, build it, take it to production and hand it over clean. Then you do it again for the next one.

Our launch partner is a publicly listed AI cloud provider (GPU cloud, hosted open models and inference). Their customers are venture backed, compute heavy companies: model labs, voice and video AI, physical AI and robotics, and agent companies serving their own models. You'll help those teams train, post-train and serve models on the platform, and you'll partner with AI startups that need FDEs to roll their product out to enterprise customers.

What you'll do

• Own customer rollouts end to end: discovery, scoping, build, launch and handover
• Serve custom and open models with vLLM or SGLang on GPU VMs, Kubernetes or serverless endpoints, with autoscaling and monitoring
• Stand up training and fine-tuning: multi-node GPU clusters (Kubernetes or Slurm), LoRA and full fine-tunes, data in object storage, experiment tracking in MLflow
• Plug AI products into customers' existing stacks (APIs, auth, data, CRM, telephony)
• Build the reusable kit: migration scripts, benchmark harnesses, sample repos, onboarding guides and customer workshops
• Be the trusted technical voice in the room with founders, CTOs and the partner's solutions team

What we're looking for

• 3+ years shipping production software at startups or software companies. This role is for mid-level and senior engineers.
• Strong backend or full-stack engineering in Python and/or TypeScript
• Hands-on experience with LLMs in production: inference APIs, evals, RAG or agents
• Comfortable with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP or Azure), Docker and Kubernetes
• You've owned a project from scoping to production with real users, not just tickets
• Clear, confident communication with customers, technical and non-technical
• Based in Australia

Why Lyra

• Work at the front line of AI infrastructure, with the GPUs and models the best AI companies run on
• Transparent, level-based progression, with fast promotions and the ability to skip levels on skill
• Performance bonus tied to customer outcomes
• Access to our Silicon Valley VC and founder network
• Free catering daily, plus drinks and snacks
• Top-of-the-line work equipment
• Hybrid work from our Sydney office in Barangaroo
• Weekly sports and activities funded by Lyra