Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), AWS

About the role

A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) embeds directly inside a strategic enterprise customer to design, build, deploy and run AI-powered production systems alongside the customer's engineering team. The Senior FDE writes production-grade software and owns outcomes end-to-end, from prototype through enterprise-scale deployment, combining the technical rigor of an AWS SDE with the urgency and ownership needed to deliver measurable customer business outcomes. The position is based in Denver, Colorado, and requires an active US Government Top Secret clearance with SCI eligibility (or higher).

Key responsibilities

• Lead technical delivery across customer engagements, owning the technical strategy and execution for complex, multi-workstream customer AI programs and making architecture decisions across services and organizations.
• Architect and build production AI systems at scale, such as multi-agent orchestration, enterprise retrieval systems and decision intelligence platforms, handling enterprise-scale traffic and reliability requirements.
• Define operational standards, evaluation frameworks and production-readiness criteria, and set testing strategies, observability standards and incident-response playbooks.
• Define engineering patterns, contribute to hiring and mentor junior FDEs into independent contributors.
• Identify opportunities to expand AI adoption, build reusable accelerators and share learnings back into AWS services and the FDE practice.

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.
• Active US Government Top Secret security clearance with SCI eligibility (or higher).
• Experience communicating technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences, including senior stakeholders.
• Experience leading agentic and spec-driven development at production scale; developing AI agents is a plus.

Required skills

• AI tools: eval frameworks, agent tooling, RAG pipelines and prompt engineering.
• Preferred: AWS services, enterprise-scale AI/ML applications, React, TypeScript, Python and/or Go.
• Preferred: 3+ years in an Agile, startup or rapidly scaling environment.

What we offer

• Salary range of $168,100 to $227,400 per year depending on location, plus sign-on payments and restricted stock units.
• Health insurance, 401(k) matching, paid time off and parental leave.