Job description

AI Engineer (Forward Deployed)

SF/NYC / Travel / $200k-$350k + early stage equity

My client is looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to sit at the intersection of engineering and customer delivery, building production AI systems directly with enterprise clients. You'll spend your time in customer environments, not just shipping code from behind a product spec, turning ambiguous real-world problems into working software that customers actually use.

Day to day, that means building and deploying LLM-powered and agentic systems, retrieval-augmented applications, and getting GenAI features from prototype into reliable production use. You'll own the evaluation and reliability side too, not just the initial build, so what you ship keeps working after you leave the room.

Strong fit for engineers coming from client-facing, applied-AI or consulting-led backgrounds, particularly those with experience at top-tier strategy or technical consulting firms. A strong CS degree is expected.

What My Client Is Looking For:

3+ years of industry experience
Comfortable operating with ambiguity and directly in front of customers
Strong Python and/or TypeScript skills in production environments
Track record deploying data-heavy or AI-enabled applications
Able to communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences
Open to travel, roughly 20 percent
Wants the pace and ownership of a startup environment

Nice to Have:

Prior forward-deployed or customer-facing engineering role
Hands-on production experience with ML, LLMs, or agentic systems
Frontend experience, React preferred