Senior SEAL Engineer
AI-First Venture Builder
About D71
D71 is Deloitte's platform-forward, AI-native forge — rapidly building, validating, and scaling new businesses that sit beyond today's core. We don't do incremental innovation. We build a portfolio of scalable ventures that give Deloitte multiple credible paths to future growth. Ventures move through a rigorous lifecycle — from Intake through Validation, Alpha, Beta, Production, and Scale — governed by stage gates, evidence-based decisioning, and a relentless focus on retiring risk fast.
About the Role
SEALs are the execution backbone of D71 ventures. In Alpha, one SEAL owns one venture end to end — from scope document to functional proof of concept. As ventures graduate into Beta and beyond, SEALs lead the transition to production-grade, scalable systems that can support real customers, monetization, and growth. You are the builder, the scope sharpener, and the architect who ensures what ships can scale.
Typical Responsibilities
Alpha — Discover & Forge
- Stress-test Alpha scope and validate that the build targets the core hypothesis.
- Create build plans using standardized, disposable architectures optimized for speed and learning.
- Ship working proofs of concept that take real input, produce real output, and generate evidence.
- Own the full technical stack: LLM orchestration, cloud infra, APIs, data pipelines, and frontend.
Beta, Production & Scale — Amplify
- Rebuild Alpha POCs into production-grade systems designed for reliability, security, and horizontal scale.
- Architect scalable cloud infrastructure on AWS/GCP: containers, serverless, auto-scaling, observability.
- Stand up engineering quality gates: CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring, SLAs, and incident response.
- Expand and lead venture pods — onboard engineers, define workstreams, and ramp the team fast.
- Partner on customer onboarding, usage analytics, billing integration, and API documentation.
Across the Lifecycle
- Define and evolve D71's AI Spec-Driven Development methodology through practice.
- Communicate tradeoffs, scope cuts, and learnings directly to Founders, Stewards, and stakeholders.
- Mentor incoming SEALs on AI-first workflows, culture, and tooling.
- Contribute reusable architecture patterns and engineering primitives back to the D71 platform.
Skills and Qualifications
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years in a senior or lead role building and scaling production systems.
- Deep fluency with AI-driven development — AI coding assistants, LLM toolchains, and generative AI are core to your daily workflow.
- End-to-end AI/ML solutioning: problem framing, model selection, prompt engineering, orchestration (LangChain, LlamaIndex, custom), evaluation, and deployment.
- Production AWS and/or GCP experience: infrastructure, CI/CD, containers (Docker, Kubernetes), serverless, and pragmatic cloud architecture under pressure.
- Proven track record taking at least one product from early prototype to scaled production serving real users.
- Proficiency with Git workflows, branching strategies, code review, and CI/CD integration.
- Full-stack capability — frontend, backend, and infrastructure. You don't wait to be unblocked.
- Startup, venture studio, or incubation experience where ambiguity was the norm and shipping speed was the metric.
- Strong communication skills — you translate technical complexity into plain language and document decisions rigorously.
- BS or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field — or equivalent practical experience.
Desired Experience
- Designing for horizontal scalability, high availability, and fault tolerance at production scale.
- Defining engineering methodologies, playbooks, or development lifecycle frameworks.
- Spec-driven, contract-first, or API-first development approaches.
- Professional services, consulting, or enterprise software environments.
- Stage-gated venture models or portfolio governance processes.
- Real-time systems, streaming architectures, or low-latency AI inference.
