Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Key Responsibilities

• Build and operate AI systems deployed in customer environments, taking ownership of system behavior, reliability, and usefulness in production
• Design and implement compound AI workflows that combine models, prompts, agents, tools, retrieval, evaluation, feedback loops, and execution into coherent production systems aligned with user and SME needs
• Develop clean, maintainable Python services and application logic that integrate AI capabilities into customer workflows, data platforms, APIs, and existing applications
• Operate on live systems by measuring behavior, identifying failure modes, debugging issues, and iterating rapidly to improve quality, reliability, and user value
• Build evaluation frameworks, test cases, feedback mechanisms, and observability patterns that help teams understand and improve AI system performance over time
• Work directly with customer stakeholders and subject matter experts to understand workflows, clarify requirements, reason about tradeoffs, and adapt systems as needs evolve
• Use AI-native engineering tools to accelerate implementation, debugging, experimentation, data analysis, and system improvement
• Collaborate with other AI Engineers, AI Strategists, and other Distillers to make pragmatic system design decisions that balance speed, robustness, maintainability, and customer impact
• Take accountability for the production outcomes of the components, workflows, and systems you build

Requirements

• 2+ years of software engineering experience
• Ownership mentality for AI systems; comfortable making technical decisions, learning from system behavior, and owning results
• Experience building AI systems with LLMs or other AI models; comfortable composing multiple components (prompts, agents, tools, retrieval, evaluators, workflows, integrations) into end-to-end systems
• Strong engineering fundamentals; write clean, maintainable Python and build production software systems; understand versioning, debugging, testing, performance, code review, and production readiness
• AI-native working style; use AI tools daily to write and debug code, explore designs, analyze data, and automate repetitive work
• Comfort in customer environments; able to work directly with customer teams, ask good questions, adapt quickly to new domains, and communicate clearly about system behavior, limitations, and tradeoffs
• Pragmatic delivery mindset; navigate ambiguity, make progress with incomplete information, and balance speed with robustness
• Willingness to travel (typically 10–30%)

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary range: $150K – $250K
• Eligible for meaningful equity
• Comprehensive benefits package including 100% covered medical, dental, and vision for employees and dependents
• 401(k) with additional perks (e.g., commuter benefits, in-office lunch)
• Access to state-of-the-art models and generous usage of modern AI tools