Forward Deployed Machine Learning Engineer

<h2><strong>About Black Forest Labs</strong></h2> <p>We're the team behind Latent Diffusion, Stable Diffusion, and FLUX — foundational technologies that changed how the world creates images and video. Our models power the tools used by millions of creators, developers, and businesses worldwide, and FLUX is among the most advanced generative systems in the world.</p> <p>Headquartered in Freiburg, Germany with a growing presence in San Francisco, we're scaling fast while staying true to what makes us different: research excellence, open science, and building technology that expands human creativity.</p> <h2><strong>Why This Role</strong></h2> <p class="whitespace-normal break-words">You'll live at the intersection of cutting-edge research and brutal production reality. Your customers won't just want FLUX to work—they'll need it optimized for their specific hardware, fine-tuned for their unique use cases, and integrated into systems that weren't designed for diffusion models in the first place.</p> <h2><strong>What You'll Work On</strong></h2> <ul class="[&:not(:last-child)_ul]:pb-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ol]:pb-1 list-disc space-y-2.5 pl-7"> <li class="whitespace-normal break-words">Ensures FLUX models perform optimally in customer environments—whether that's on-premise GPU clusters or BFL-hosted infrastructure—balancing the eternal tension between latency and output quality</li> <li class="whitespace-normal break-words">Architects deep product integrations that go far beyond "here's an API endpoint"—helping customers with everything from model hosting and deployment to inference optimization techniques that haven't made it into textbooks yet</li> <li class="whitespace-normal break-words">Customizes our foundation models for visual media to solve problems customers couldn't articulate until you helped them understand what's possible</li> <li class="whitespace-normal break-words">Sits in technical deep-dives with customers to diagnose performance bottlenecks, then translates those findings into solutions (and sometimes into research questions for our core team)</li> <li class="whitespace-normal break-words">Discovers where generative visual AI should go next by understanding what industries are struggling with problems we could solve</li> </ul> <h2><strong>What We're Looking For</strong></h2> <p class="whitespace-normal break-words">You understand diffusion models not just conceptually, but viscerally—you've debugged them, optimized them, served them at scale. You've been in the room when a customer's integration goes wrong and you need to diagnose whether it's a model issue,