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Forward Deployed AI Engineer - Enterprise Lead

180k – 250kSan Francisco, CANew York, NYHybrid8+ YOE
Summary

Senior technical leader accountable for complex enterprise AI deployments. Owns technical direction across multi-team engagements, develops engineering leaders, and partners with customer executives on architecture and delivery.

About the role

Key Responsibilities

  • Lead the technical success of complex enterprise AI deployments, either across one large customer engagement or a portfolio of smaller accounts, often spanning multiple use cases, production systems, workstreams, and teams
  • Set technical direction across engagements, ensuring architecture, system behavior, evaluation strategy, integrations, and operational practices remain coherent as deployments grow
  • Develop Forward Deployed AI Engineer Leads, senior ICs, and emerging technical leaders, raising the bar for technical judgment, code quality, customer communication, and production ownership
  • Serve as the senior technical partner to customer executives, enterprise architects, and business partners, building trust through clear communication, sound judgment, and reliable delivery
  • Maintain technical proximity to live systems by reviewing designs, interrogating system behavior, debugging critical issues, guiding evaluation strategy, and participating in incident reviews and production quality improvements
  • Use AI-native engineering practices to increase your own leverage and model effective use of AI tools for design, implementation, debugging, analysis, experimentation, and operational improvement
  • Partner with company leadership on staffing, organizational design, leadership development, and customer expansion as engagements grow from pilot to enterprise-scale deployment

Requirements

  • 8+ years of software engineering experience, including experience leading technical teams through ambiguous, high-stakes production delivery
  • Multi-team technical leadership experience across multiple teams, workstreams, accounts, or senior engineers
  • Talent development experience coaching Tech Leads, senior ICs, and emerging leaders; prior people management experience strongly preferred
  • Enterprise technical ownership with responsibility for whether complex technical deployments deliver durable customer value
  • Technical proximity and judgment: ability to reason deeply about architecture, debugging, testing, observability, performance, maintainability, security, and code quality
  • Customer and executive judgment: ability to communicate clearly with executives, IT leaders, data teams, and operational SMEs about system behavior, delivery tradeoffs, risks, and limitations
  • AI-native working style: daily use of AI tools to write and debug code, explore designs, analyze data, automate repetitive work, and improve leverage
  • Willingness to travel 20–40%

Compensation & Benefits

  • Base salary range: $180K – $250K
  • Meaningful equity
  • 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
Skills
PythonMachine LearningAI SystemsSystem ArchitectureProduction DeploymentDebuggingObservabilityTestingSecurityCode Quality
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