Baseten vs Groq

Two inference-infrastructure companies selling to the same buyers (teams that need fast, cheap model serving in production), with FDE-adjacent seats priced very differently: Baseten posts a tight, high band in San Francisco; Groq posts a wide one out of Mountain View with a US-remote option.

	Baseten	Groq
Open roles	1	1
Comp on board	$260K–$380K	$143.6K–$289.1K
FDE type	Solutions engineering	Solutions engineering
Travel	Medium	High
Comp	Top of market	Competitive
Stage	Growth-stage	Growth-stage
Our take	Hiring the FDE manager and the ICs at once — join the org on day zero, or run it.	One of the few FDE seats on the chip side of the inference war — deploy on the LPU, not the model.

Bottom line

Baseten's $260K–$380K is the higher, cleaner number, a medium-travel Bay Area seat on a software-only serving stack. Groq's $143.6K–$289.1K spans a much lower floor and carries more travel, with the upside tied to selling a proprietary chip and cloud against Nvidia. Pick Baseten for cash and a narrower, engineering-led scope; pick Groq if you want US-remote flexibility and a differentiated hardware story, and ask where in the band the offer lands.