Principal AI Software Engineer, Forward Deployed

Confidential Jobs is seeking a highly autonomous Forward Deployed Engineer who bridges the gap between software engineering and direct business impact. The role focuses on discovering undefined business challenges and rapidly prototyping working solutions using AI-augmented development to deliver value quickly and build applied AI applications that solve real-world problems.

Responsibilities:

• Applied AI Development: You will focus on building practical, high-impact AI applications (such as RAG agents and LangChain workflows) to solve immediate business needs, rather than focusing on bespoke model training or fine-tuning
• AI-Augmented Engineering: Strategically integrate AI coding assistants into your development workflow to accelerate delivery. You will treat AI as a force multiplier but review all AI-generated code with extreme rigor—never shipping code you do not fully understand
• AI Evaluation & Verification: Design systematic evaluation frameworks for AI systems. You will build evaluation datasets, run LLM-as-judge experiments, and critically assess AI outputs for quality, bias, and hallucination risks before they reach production
• Rapid Prototyping: Build complete, working full-stack solutions rapidly to test core assumptions and establish trust with stakeholders. You know how to balance necessary technical debt with delivery speed to prove business value
• Problem Discovery & Specification: Embed with users to discover latent needs. You will write exceptionally precise requirements and specifications—understanding that in the AI era, clear human intent is required for AI tools to generate accurate solutions

Requirements:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with a strong focus on hands-on, end-to-end application delivery
• Demonstrated experience building applications utilizing modern LLM APIs, RAG architectures, and AI agent frameworks
• Strong proficiency in modern full-stack languages and frameworks (JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, React/Next.js, Node)
• A 'Polymath' Builder: We highly value diverse, non-traditional career paths (e.g., transitioning from science, academia, or other engineering disciplines into software). You can rapidly learn new industry domains and seamlessly translate between business and engineering
• T-Shaped Technical Breadth: You possess expert-level, hands-on depth in Full-Stack Development and Architecture, backed by strong foundational skills in Cloud Platforms (AWS/GCP, Terraform) and DevOps
• Outcome Owner: You take extreme end-to-end ownership of your features. You prioritize business outcomes and impact metrics over pure technical elegance
• Systems Thinker: You map complex system interactions and anticipate cascading effects before building, easily making the trade-off between custom one-off solutions and generalizable patterns
• AI Literate: You have a realistic understanding of what AI can and cannot do, separating marketing claims from reality to make informed decisions on when to use AI versus traditional software engineering approaches