Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Job Title: Staff Forward Deployed Engineer Location: Hybrid - San Francisco, California Salary: $250,000-$300,000 About The Opportunity: Join a rapidly growing technology organization operating at the intersection of artificial intelligence, data, and enterprise automation. The company partners with leading organizations across a range of industries to build and deploy intelligent solutions that streamline complex workflows, transform business operations, and unlock new levels of productivity. This is an opportunity to join a high-growth, technically sophisticated environment where innovation, ownership, and solving complex problems are at the center of the culture. Responsibilities: Partner with delivery teams and executive stakeholders to scope, design, and implement AI-driven customer solutions. Identify opportunities within complex and ambiguous workflows and transform them into repeatable, technology-enabled systems. Lead architecture and technical trade-off discussions across performance, scalability, cost, and reliability. Own projects from initial discovery through deployment, client delivery, internal coordination, and post-launch iteration. Build shared infrastructure, reusable components, APIs, and internal engineering playbooks. Develop and deploy backend, machine learning, and LLM-powered systems using modern cloud and containerized infrastructure. Coach and mentor engineers while helping establish best practices for forward-deployed AI engineering. Support customer operations, including on-call responsibilities and travel for onsite client engagements as needed. Must-Have Skills: 10+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial experience building backend, data, or machine learning systems. Deep proficiency in Python and hands-on experience with ML and LLM frameworks including Hugging Face, LangChain, OpenAI, and Pinecone. Experience designing and deploying APIs and services using FastAPI, Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS. Strong understanding of workflow orchestration, pub/sub systems such as Kafka, schema governance, and data contracts. Expertise in data governance, data quality enforcement, ETL or Delta pipelines, policy management, and data operations. Strong product and system design judgment, with the ability to translate business needs into effective technical architecture. Proven ability to build reliable systems from messy data and ambiguous requirements. Excellent communication and client-facing skills across technical and non-technical audiences. Experience owning high-stakes projects from scoping through deployment, with a willingness to support customer on-call needs. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience. Nice-to-Have Skills: Experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, technical consultant, or customer-facing software engineer. Familiarity with Unity Catalog, cluster and job orchestration, replay processes, and advanced policy management. Experience creating reusable AI infrastructure, internal frameworks, or engineering playbooks. Background delivering AI, data, or automation solutions in complex enterprise environments. Experience mentoring engineers and influencing engineering culture and technical standards. Willingness to travel 25–50% for onsite customer engagements. Show more Show less