Joey Zwicker joins Baseten as Head of FDE

At Baseten, our job is straightforward. We help teams ship AI products that are fast, reliable, and cost-efficient. We do that by staying close to customers and letting real workloads shape how we build.

Today, I am happy to share that Joey Zwicker is joining Baseten as Head of Forward Deployed Engineering.

About Joey

Joey has been building for a long time. In 2014, when Docker and Kubernetes were still brand new, Joey co-founded a company dedicated to automating reproducible data pipelines called Pachyderm. 

He and his co-founder bet that if machine learning was going to matter, teams would need reproducibility and data lineage to move safely from experiments to production. That work carried him into government, finance, and healthcare, where teams operated at petabyte scale in regulated environments and needed data systems that could stand up to real audits.

When HPE acquired Pachyderm in 2023, Joey made a jump to the large enterprise. At HPE, he led the AI Solutions & Private Cloud business units, owning all AI software products across data, training, and inference. He learned how to operationalise at scale without losing pace, and he kept a hand in customer incidents when it counted. That balance of leadership and hands-on work is exactly what we value.

How Joey will lead FDE at Baseten

Forward Deployed Engineering is our most hands-on function with customers. It owns outcomes in production and stays accountable throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Under Joey’s leadership, FDE will be responsible for partnering with our customers to implement inference solutions that keep their workloads performant, reliable, and cost-efficient at scale.

We believe excellence should be repeatable, and Joey will push us to turn good instincts into habits that teams actively want to use. FDEs will bridge the gap between production-scale solution architecting, engineering, and outcome-centric support, folding real-world learnings back into our core product.

Just as important, Joey will lead the growth of our bench of talent. He’ll hire and train engineers who love owning outcomes and solving the most complex problems on behalf of our customers. That is how trust is built.

A conversation with Joey

I sat down with Joey to talk about his path, his thoughts on the FDE role, and why he’s excited to join Baseten now.

Tell us your story in your own words.

Joey:
I stumbled into startups in undergrad. I was on campus over winter break, built a small site with a friend, and it started paying for more than beer money. That feeling of building something useful and watching people use it never left. 

I went on to four startups, three as a founder, and took an early role at a NoSQL database company. My first internship was with Trevor Blackwell, which put me in the room for YC Tuesday dinners. Listening to founders talk plainly about what worked and what did not shaped how I think about building.

Why do you gravitate towards companies solving hard, high-scale problems?

Joey:
That is where the impact lives. When a mission-critical system needs to move from stuck to shipping, the change is felt across the business. I am not interested in being the fifth-best option in a big market. I would rather compete for the top spot because the learning is faster, the feedback is direct, and the team gets sharper.

What makes forward deployed engineering a craft rather than just a role?

Joey:
FDE is founder training. You write code, sit with customers, and make a lot of decisions with imperfect information. One hour might be GPU scheduling, the next is a discussion about compliance and change management, and then you are in a PRD review arguing for ergonomics. You need range and the stamina to context switch without losing the thread. 

My approach is to do the job until the edges are clear, then hire people who are better than me for each slice. We reshape roles every quarter to match what customers and the product really need, and people here get first crack at new responsibilities as the surface area grows.

How do you build trust with both small startups and large enterprises?

Joey:
You show up with engineers who are ready for architecture, not just a demo. You co-design the system, you are explicit about trade-offs and timelines, and when something goes sideways, you own it, fix it, and write it down so the next team moves faster. Customers remember who solved their hardest week.

Why are you excited about Baseten, and why did you decide now was the time to join?

Joey:
Baseten is powering inference at massive scale, which raises the stakes in the right way. The founders and leadership are hands-on and transparent. My interviews felt like a two-way evaluation. I pushed on how we can scale, and the answer was never defensive. It was yes, let’s build that together.

I want to help a company that has passed the zero-to-one stage keep compounding. Keep the speed and empathy, add operational backbone where it multiplies, and use the FDEs to keep the loop tight between the customers and the product outcomes.

We are hiring

If you enjoy complex problems, care about performance, and want to work at the junction of customer reality and product decisions, Joey wants to talk. We are hiring FDEs in all geographies.

Welcome, Joey. We’re excited to build together.