Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Role overview Lead customer-facing AI projects from early problem discovery through production deployment. You’ll work with business and technical stakeholders to identify valuable use cases, design agentic systems, and deliver measurable results while staying accountable for their quality and operation.

Responsibilities - Explore customer workflows, clarify ambiguous needs, and turn them into technical plans and outcome measures. - Architect and build production AI systems, including multi-step agents, orchestration, retrieval, tool use, and supporting APIs and data pipelines. - Lead projects from discovery to deployment, working directly with senior customer stakeholders. - Own evaluation, observability, security, reliability, latency, scalability, and cost throughout delivery. - Adapt to unfamiliar environments and help establish working practices as the team and its delivery approach develop.

Requirements - Typically 8 or more years building and operating production software, including backend systems, APIs, databases, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure. - Hands-on experience building production LLM or agent systems involving orchestration, tools, memory or state, retrieval, and multi-step workflows. - Experience taking complex systems from architecture through deployment and ongoing operation. - Practical knowledge of evaluation, observability, security, reliability, guardrails, performance, and cost management. - Strong customer and technical leadership: able to navigate ambiguity, build trust, challenge assumptions constructively, and communicate clearly with executives and engineers. - Willingness to work in person three to five days a week, depending on customer needs, and to take substantial ownership in a demanding environment.

Benefits and work setup The role is based in the Los Angeles area, with regular in-person work at an office or customer site. The source lists a base salary of $200,000–$250,000 plus equity.