Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

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. FDEs write production-grade software and own 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. They create reusable architectures, patterns and engineering mechanisms that scale the FDE practice. The role requires 30-50% travel.

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, including 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 establish testing strategies, observability standards and incident response playbooks.
• Define engineering patterns, contribute to hiring, mentor junior FDEs and coach others on system design, customer engagement and production operations.
• Identify opportunities to expand AI adoption, create accelerators and reusable platforms, and feed 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.
• 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).
• Preferred: Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent, experience building or deploying AI/ML applications at enterprise scale, and experience architecting complex, multi-component systems in customer production environments.

Required skills

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

What we offer

• Base salary ranging from $184,900 to $250,200 per year depending on location (New York).
• Sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs).
• Health insurance, 401(k) matching, paid time off and parental leave.