Forward Deployed Engineer II (AI Systems)

About the role

A Forward Deployed Engineer II (FDE II) embeds directly inside a strategic enterprise customer to independently design, build, deploy and run AI-powered production systems alongside the customer's engineering team. FDE IIs write production-grade software and own delivery of complete AI workstreams end-to-end, from requirements gathering through production deployment. The role requires 30-50% travel.

Key responsibilities

• Embed within customer engineering teams, understanding the customer's business processes, technical architecture and operational constraints, and translating requirements into technical designs for AI-enabled production systems.
• Design and develop production-grade software powering AI and agentic workflows, such as retrieval pipelines, workflow automation, API orchestration layers and data integration, integrating foundation models and customer data sources while optimizing for latency, reliability and cost.
• Own production for the workstream: contribute to the full software development lifecycle, troubleshoot production incidents, implement monitoring, evaluations, guardrails and CI/CD, and improve operations.
• Mentor and train new team members, and coach others on high-quality code through code reviews.
• Identify opportunities to expand AI adoption within the customer engagement and codify reusable patterns and accelerators that feed back into AWS services.

Required profile

• 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience.
• 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language.
• 5+ years of leading design or architecture of new and existing systems.
• Experience as a mentor, tech lead or engineering team lead.
• Experience communicating technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
• Experience leading agentic and spec-driven development at production scale (developing AI agents is a plus).

Required skills

• Experience with AI tools: eval frameworks, agent tooling, RAG pipelines and prompt engineering.
• Preferred: experience with AWS services, building or deploying AI/ML applications at enterprise production scale, and architecting complex multi-component systems in customer production environments.
• Preferred: React, TypeScript, Python and/or Go; experience leading customer-facing technical projects.

What we offer

• Base salary of 143,700 to 194,400 USD annually, plus sign-on payments and restricted stock units.
• Health insurance, 401(k) matching, paid time off and parental leave.