Forward Deployed Engineer
XcedeAbout the role
Job Description: Forward Deployed Engineer
Location: San Francisco (Hybrid — 3 days/week in office)
Compensation: $170K–$400K base + equity
Travel: Up to 50%, including on-site client work
About the Company
We're working with a newly launched AI deployment company, purpose-built to deliver enterprise AI transformation at scale. As model capabilities accelerate, deployment has become the primary bottleneck to realizing AI's value inside large enterprises. We exist to close that gap.
We sit at the intersection of frontier AI, enterprise transformation, and scaled delivery - partnering with many of the world's largest and most influential companies to solve their hardest business problems using the latest advances in AI.
About the Role
We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to lead the design, build, and deployment of enterprise AI systems. You'll operate as a senior technical owner across customer engagements, shaping architecture, setting engineering standards, and helping teams move from prototype to durable production systems. This is one of the few places to work with startup-level autonomy while building for the scale and complexity of the world's largest enterprises.
Day to day, you'll lead technical discovery, design solution architecture, build production-grade agentic AI applications, mentor engineers, evaluate model behavior, and turn field learnings into reusable delivery patterns.
What You'll Do
Own architecture, implementation quality, evaluation strategy, and production readiness for customer LLM systems
Build AI applications, agents, and workflow tools using LLMs, retrieval, orchestration, APIs, and production software practices
Guide engineers through ambiguous technical problems - reviewing designs, code, and tradeoffs
Work directly with customer technical and business stakeholders to translate workflows into reliable AI systems
Prototype quickly, then harden what works into reusable reference architectures
Design evaluation and monitoring approaches for quality, reliability, and trust
Feed field insights back into product and research priorities
What We're Looking For
Senior software engineering experience building production applications, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure
Strong Python and SQL for building robust data applications in enterprise settings
Production LLM experience - agents, retrieval, evaluation, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, model integration
Track record taking projects from prototype to production while keeping a high bar
Comfortable as a hands-on player-coach: writing code, reviewing designs, mentoring, owning customer outcomes
Strong communication across executive, customer, product, and engineering audiences
Good judgment on standardization vs. bespoke work
Calm under pressure, turning messy deployment problems into repeatable patterns
Forward-deployed backgrounds especially valued; direct pre-sales exposure a plus, not required
Responsibilities
- Own architecture, implementation quality, evaluation strategy, and production readiness for customer LLM systems
- Build AI applications, agents, and workflow tools using LLMs, retrieval, orchestration, APIs, and production software practices
- Guide engineers through ambiguous technical problems - reviewing designs, code, and tradeoffs
- Work directly with customer technical and business stakeholders to translate workflows into reliable AI systems
- Prototype quickly, then harden what works into reusable reference architectures
- Design evaluation and monitoring approaches for quality, reliability, and trust
- Feed field insights back into product and research priorities
Qualifications
- Senior software engineering experience building production applications, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure
- Strong Python and SQL for building robust data applications in enterprise settings
- Production LLM experience - agents, retrieval, evaluation, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, model integration
- Track record taking projects from prototype to production while keeping a high bar
- Comfortable as a hands-on player-coach: writing code, reviewing designs, mentoring, owning customer outcomes
- Strong communication across executive, customer, product, and engineering audiences
- Good judgment on standardization vs. bespoke work
- Calm under pressure, turning messy deployment problems into repeatable patterns
Benefits
- Equity
Skills mentioned
About Xcede
Global Technology Recruitment Specialists. We source and select top talent across all technology sectors globally. Founded in 2003, our vertical specialists provide global transformational talent in data, AI & machine learning, product, software, cloud and cyber. As part of the Xcede Group, we work with businesses, from pioneering start-ups to global brands, to find project-based or permanent talent that enables innovation in line with their vision and goals.