Manager, ML Solutions Architecture - Token Factory
The role
This position sits within Nebius Token Factory, our serverless platform for running and customizing open-source LLMs in production. Token Factory allows for serverless inference and fine-tuning backed by in-house optimizations like custom speculative decoding, quantization, cache-aware routing and dedicated endpoints. Customers come to us to move from prototype to scaled production without the cost and complexity of building and tuning their own inference stack.
Our Solutions Architects own the technical delivery of customer engagements: deploying open-source models, tuning the serving stack, benchmarking against the customer's success criteria, and carrying the technical relationship through to production. Sales Engineers qualify and scope the opportunity; SAs execute it. Technical Account Managers take it from production onward.
We're looking for a Manager, ML Solutions Architecture to lead our EU regional SA teams. Your scope is PoC delivery and post-sales technical support: the people who do it, the standard they do it to, and the operating cadence that keeps it predictable. You will report to the Head of Solutions Architecture and partner with a peer manager in the other region.
We expect you to push people when they need pushing, make the uncomfortable call when deliverables don't land even though the effort was real, and take ownership of the documentation work: implement and monitor the following of the guidelines, ticket hygiene, and making sure the team actually uses all three.
You're welcome to work remotely from any EU country.
Your responsibilities will include:
Lead the team
Manage a team of 8 Solutions Architects, with continued growth planned: 1:1s, goal setting, performance reviews, promotion cases, and individual growth plans
Build an accurate picture of each SA's strengths, gaps, and preferences, and allocate accounts and engagements against both expertise and interest
Run the cadence that surfaces blockers early, then take them to the development, product, and business teams that can clear them, and stay on them until they do
Hold people to outcomes: distinguish effort from delivered results, say so plainly when the two diverge, and reflect it in ratings and compensation decisions
Onboard new joiners through to their first independently delivered engagement
Coach SAs into stronger engineers and stronger communicators, and make deliberate calls about who is ready for more scope
Own delivery
Be accountable for your team's delivery outcomes: time from PoC kick-off to first optimized dedicated endpoint, success-criteria hit rate, and the quality of the technical relationship after the customer goes to production
Review technical work before it reaches the customer: benchmarking methodology, serving configurations, results, closure documents; catch the wrong conclusion drawn from a metrics artifact before a customer sees it
Ensure staffing and escalation coverage across accounts and timezones, including post-sales request load that does not respect sprint boundaries
Call infeasibility early and with evidence, rather than letting the team burn iterations against requirements the platform cannot meet today
Own the operating system of the team
Maintain and extend the team's documentation: responsibilities, runbooks, guides, onboarding, definitions of done, engagement closure templates. Keep it accurate and reachable; link, don't copy
Get it used, not just written: documentation nobody reads is a cost, not an asset
Keep the ticket tracker the system of record, so PoC and production status is readable without asking anyone
Instrument the work: define and report the metrics that show whether delivery is getting faster and more reliable over time
Work across teams
Development and research teams: convert recurring customer pain into prioritized platform work, and represent the customer's technical reality in roadmap discussions
Pre-sales: hold the scoping-to-execution boundary: push back on under-scoped engagements, and feed feasibility signal back upstream
Account management: make production handoffs uneventful, and keep post-sales technical requests moving
Business and leadership: give a straight read on account health, technical feasibility, and capacity needs
We expect you to have:
3+ years managing technical teams, including performance management and difficult conversations
Experience managing a customer-facing team. Running a team whose work is visible to customers, on customer timelines, with customer escalations.
Strong ML knowledge: LLM architectures, fine-tuning approaches (SFT/LoRA, RL-based), evaluation design, and a working command of inference internals — quantization, KV-cache management, batching, routing, speculative decoding — and of the frameworks the team works in (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM)
Enough technical judgment to review someone else's benchmark and find the flaw in the methodology, not just in the conclusion
Python strong enough to read and review your team's code
Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly explain technical concepts to diverse audiences, from engineers to executives, including in front of enterprise customers under pressure
Genuine tolerance for operational work: documentation, process design, reporting, and the follow-through that makes them stick
Comfort operating with ambiguity across distributed teams and timezones, and a bias toward writing things down
It would be an added bonus if you have:
References from both former managers and former direct reports
Experience scaling a team through rapid growth (5 → 15+) without losing delivery quality
Prior experience in a customer-facing technical function at a cloud, inference, or AI infrastructure provider
Experience defining process and documentation for a team that had none
Hands-on background running LLMs in production and debugging inference workloads at the framework level
Work with multimodal AI models (vision-language, speech)
Proficiency with DevOps tooling (Docker, Kubernetes) and infrastructure-as-code
Preferred technical stack:
Programming languages: Python
ML frameworks and libraries: vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, SGLang, Transformers, OpenAI/Anthropic SDKs
MLOps and DevOps tools: Kubernetes (K8s), Docker, Git
Cloud platforms: AWS (SageMaker, Bedrock), GCP (Vertex AI), Azure (Azure ML)