Founding AI Forward Deployed Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Founding AI Forward Deployed Engineer based in United States. This is a founding engineering role focused on deploying production-grade agentic AI solutions directly within enterprise customer environments. You will own strategic deployments end to end, from discovery and workflow analysis through production launch, optimization, ROI validation, and expansion. The role combines hands-on software engineering with customer-facing technical leadership across voice and digital AI experiences. You will build multi-turn agents, integrations, retrieval pipelines, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, and observability capabilities for real-world use cases. Your work will directly influence product strategy, engineering priorities, deployment methodologies, and the future structure of the forward-deployed engineering function. You will also contribute to pre-sales through technical demonstrations, architectural discussions, proof-of-concepts, and deployment scoping. With an established enterprise customer base and significant autonomy, this role offers exceptional opportunity to shape a new function while solving complex AI problems at scale. Own end-to-end strategic customer deployments, including discovery, workflow analysis, success criteria definition, production deployment, optimization, ROI validation, and expansion. Analyze customer workflows such as call routing, agent scripts, escalation paths, and back-office handoffs to identify opportunities for effective AI automation. Build and ship production-grade multi-turn AI agent workflows, including prompt architectures, retrieval pipelines, decision logic, fallback handling, and live-agent handoffs. Develop integrations with enterprise systems of record and customer technologies, including CRM, healthcare, ticketing, and custom APIs. Implement appropriate guardrails and compliance controls for sensitive environments involving PII, HIPAA, PCI, and other customer-specific requirements. Design and deploy evaluation, monitoring, testing, and observability frameworks that continuously measure and improve agent performance. Establish measurable success criteria before deployment and use production data to validate outcomes and guide iteration. Identify recurring technical requirements, integration patterns, and platform gaps, translating field experience into actionable recommendations for Product and Engineering. Contribute directly to roadmap prioritization by documenting customer needs and technical findings with sufficient depth for engineering teams to act on them. Serve as a senior technical resource during the sales process, supporting live demonstrations, architectural discussions, proof-of-concept development, and deployment scoping. Partner with account executives, sales engineers, customers, product teams, and engineering teams to turn successful pilots into scalable expansion opportunities. Help establish the operating model for a new forward-deployed engineering function, including deployment methodologies, evaluation standards, integration patterns, and future hiring practices. Requirements: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent military or professional experience. At least 4 years of customer-facing technical experience in forward-deployed engineering, solutions architecture with hands-on implementation ownership, technical consulting, or a comparable discipline. Strong software engineering background with demonstrated ability to write and deploy production code, particularly in Python and/or TypeScript. Proven experience independently building, integrating, debugging, and supporting production APIs and customer-facing systems. Hands-on experience working with LLMs in production environments, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agent orchestration, evaluation, prompt architecture, and tool use. Demonstrated ability to diagnose and resolve r