Senior / Staff Forward Deployment Engineer

Job Responsibilities

Below is an opportunity that you might be interested in.

Position: Senior / Staff Forward Deployment Engineer

Location: Aliso Viejo, CA

Duration: 9 Months

Job Description:

Position Overview

• Client is building founding Forward Deployment Engineering team, and we're looking for seasoned engineers to set the bar. As a Senior/Staff FDE, you sit at the intersection of engineering and the customer.
• You embed directly with internal business teams and external partners to take powerful platforms AI/GenAI tools, data products, and custom integrations and turn them into working solutions that deliver real outcomes.
• You are part builder, part problem-solver, and part trusted advisor: writing production code one day, mapping a messy real-world workflow the next, and advising senior stakeholders on strategy by the end of the week.
• This is a high-impact role for an experienced engineer who has done the work before, thrives in ambiguity, and operates with little oversight.
• As one of the first FDEs, you won't just deploy solutions you'll define how this team works: the playbooks, the standards, the tooling, and the bar for everyone who follows.
• You'll also mentor more junior engineers as the team scales.

What You'll Do

• Embed with internal teams and external customers to understand their workflows, pain points, and goals then design and deploy solutions that fit.
• Build production-quality code, integrations, and automations across AI/GenAI, data, and software platforms to solve concrete business problems.
• Prototype rapid prototypes and proofs-of-concept, iterate based on direct user feedback, and move them into reliable, scalable production.
• Integrate data pipelines, APIs, and third-party systems, handling the real-world messiness of enterprise environments.
• Partner with end users and stakeholders running demos, gathering requirements, troubleshooting live, and translating technical concepts into business value.
• Feed recurring pain points and friction back to product and engineering teams to influence the core roadmap.
• Monitor and improve solutions for reliability, performance, and adoption after launch you own outcomes, not just deliverables.
• Establish the playbooks, standards, and tooling for the FDE function, and mentor junior engineers as the team grows.

What You'll Bring

• Experience: 8+ years building and shipping software in production, including significant time owning complex, ambiguous projects end-to-end with minimal supervision.
• Technical depth: Deep, hands-on programming expertise (e.g., Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, or Go), strong system design judgment, and fluency working across the full stack and with APIs.
• Platform fluency: Proven experience with data tools (SQL, pipelines, warehouses such as Snowflake/Databricks) and/or AI/GenAI tooling (LLMs, RAG, agentic workflows). You bring real breadth and adapt quickly to the right tool for the problem.
• Customer-facing track record: A track record of customer-facing or forward-deployed work you've shipped solutions directly with end users, navigated enterprise complexity, and earned the trust of senior stakeholders.
• Leadership: You've led projects, set technical direction, and raised the bar for those around you formally or informally.
• Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication; you translate fluidly between deep technical detail and executive-level business value.
• Bias for action: You ship, learn, and iterate quickly at a high-quality bar, and you bring order to ambiguous, fast-moving situations.

Nice to Have

• Experience deploying AI/ML or LLM-based solutions in an enterprise setting.
• Cloud experience (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure) and familiarity with CI/CD and containerization.
• Experience as a founding or early member of a new team or function.
• Telecommunications or large-scale enterprise data domain knowledge.