Senior / Staff Forward Deployment Engineer
Engineering | Senior–Staff Individual Contributor | Founding Team | Contract-to-Hire
Engagement: 6–12-month contract with potential conversion to full-time
About the Role
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, GCP, 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.
Engagement
This is an initial contract engagement (typically 6–12 months) with the potential to convert to a full-time role based on fit and impact. It's an ideal opportunity for a seasoned engineer who wants to help stand up a brand-new function, prove the model, and shape what a permanent FDE team looks like at client site.
Please share profiles at [email protected]
Pay: From $62.00 per hour
Work Location: In person
