Forward Deployed Engineer

Role: Forward Deployed Engineer - Automotive AI Location: San Mateo, CA Compensation: up to $220k base (depending on experience) Harrison Clarke are partnered with a well-funded AI company building an agentic AI system designed to operate as a teammate inside engineering organizations - not a tool, but an AI agent that works alongside human engineers using the same complex engineering tools they use. The company recently closed a $50M+ Series A from a top-tier VC and is backed by luminaries from leading AI labs. They are preparing to launch with new automotive customers and need a Forward Deployed Engineer to lead that deployment. Role Requirements: Serve as the technical lead for customer deployments, making key decisions on architecture, data integrations, and user experience Lead discovery sessions with customer engineering teams, translate their challenges into AI use cases, and design how the product integrates into their workflows Build end-to-end AI solutions, take them into production, and provide post-deployment support to ensure customer success Connect the AI system to customer engineering data sources and tools, iterating until it delivers measurable value Identify, collect, and prepare customer data to fine-tune models; source evaluation criteria from customer sessions to validate improved capability Diagnose and resolve critical issues in live deployments; drive root-cause analysis and implement durable improvements Collaborate closely with internal AI specialists to develop novel systems capable of executing critical customer engineering tasks Profile Signals: A physical engineering background in automotive, aerospace, mechanical, electrical, or similar. You understand how engineering organizations operate from the inside Experience shipping data-driven or AI systems to production. Python experience strongly preferred Comfortable working directly with customers and technical leaders. You've run technical discovery, built trust with enterprise teams, and translated problems into solutions Have integrated or extended AI systems in production. Bonus points for engineering or scientific domains Can rapidly build integrations between disparate customer systems Delivered solutions in secure enterprise environments Experience with live production troubleshooting and customer incident response Prior experience at an automotive OEM, supplier, or adjacent industry is a strong plus Ideal Background: Started as an engineer in a physical domain (automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, robotics) Transitioned into software, AI, or technical implementation Has held customer-facing technical roles like FDE, solutions engineer, consulting engineer, or similar Understands agentic AI systems, RAG, model fine-tuning, or production ML workflows If you're a technical builder who speaks both engineering and AI, and you're excited about deploying an AI agent into real-world engineering workflows at a major automotive company, apply below! Show more Show less