Forward Deployment Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

Role Purpose

The Forward Deployed Engineer builds and delivers production-grade, AI-powered systems directly with

customers. This is a builder role: you will write, ship, and operate code in real customer environments.

The FDE bridges product intent, engineering execution, and real-world deployment - owning solutions

end-to-end. From discovery through production, the FDE ensures Agentic AI systems deliver measurable

customer and business impact.

What You'll Do

Design and Deploy Production AI Systems

● Design, build, and deploy production-ready AI systems in real customer environments.

● Implement Agentic AI solutions (RAG, orchestration, tool/function calling, multi-step workflows).

● Translate ambiguous customer problems into shippable technical architectures with clear

trade-offs.

● Move solutions from proof-of-concept to production with measurable adoption.

● Engineer for enterprise-grade quality: secure, scalable, observable, resilient.

Own End-to-End Customer Delivery

● Lead delivery from discovery and architecture through rollout, iteration, and operational

readiness.

● Embed directly with customer teams to understand tech stack, workflow constraints, and success

criteria.

● Make pragmatic architectural decisions under delivery pressure and evolving constraints in the

customer stack.

● Measure success by delivered impact and adoption - not effort or billable time.

Operationalize for Scale

● Establish deployment patterns, evaluation loops, and monitoring frameworks.

● Implement reliability patterns: retries, fallbacks, idempotency, and safe failure modes for agentic

workflows.

● Tune systems for performance and economics (latency, throughput, cost) without sacrificing

quality.

● Mentor engineers in production-grade AI delivery practices and reusable reference architectures.

Partner Across Product and Platform

● Collaborate with AI Engineers, platform teams, and research to align architecture with long-term

direction.

● Provide real-world deployment feedback to strengthen platform capabilities and accelerators.

● Balance experimentation velocity with enterprise-grade reliability.

Influence at Executive and Customer Altitude

● Communicate architecture, risks, and constraints clearly to executives and non-technical

stakeholders.

● Frame decisions across scope, reliability, speed, and cost in decision-ready language.

● Build trust through transparency, delivery rigor, and measurable outcomes.

Transition Delivery to Durable Ownership

● Ensure systems transition cleanly into sustained operation with clear ownership and

documentation.

● Define monitoring, support, and iteration plans; reduce ambiguity for inheriting teams.

● Support long-term adoption and continuous improvement cycles.

Requirements

● 5+ years in software engineering, architecture, or technical delivery; strong record of shipping

production systems.

● Demonstrated customer-embedded delivery: discovery-to-deployment in enterprise

environments.

● Hands-on backend and integration engineering (APIs, services, data integrations); strong

debugging skills.

● Experience building LLM applications (tool calling, RAG, orchestration) and creating eval/quality

gates.

● Production deployment discipline (CI/CD, environments, containers) and cloud experience

(AWS/Azure/GCP).

● Security and privacy fundamentals (secrets, access controls, PII handling) applied in

implementations.

● Strong communication and stakeholder influence; comfortable translating trade-offs to decision makers.