Forward Deployed Engineer, Enterprise AI Transformation

On-site (New York City, NY) · $180K base (OTE $270K–$300K+) · 20 openings

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**About the company**

A fast-growing AI consulting company that embeds directly inside Fortune 500 operations to ship AI-native systems that actually run in production, not just demo well. The company works alongside major AI labs' own applied teams on real client work and has been named a formal launch partner for at least one major AI product rollout. Founded roughly a year ago by a team that includes a founder with a prior successful company, the company has grown from a handful of people to dozens in about a year, with plans to keep growing significantly through year-end.

**The role and the culture, plainly stated**

You'll work in small pods, a mix of strategists and engineers, embedded directly with a client, learning their domain and owning the problem end-to-end. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, your job is to make those bets real: you personally design, build, and ship modern web and agentic applications directly into Fortune 500 client environments.

Be direct with yourself about the pace before you apply. This is high-agency, high-urgency work. The standard is not the demo, it's whether what you built is still quietly running in production on Monday morning when nobody from the company is in the room. This is not a mandated always-on culture, but it is not a standard 40-hour week either: if a deliverable isn't done by Friday, the norm is to work through the weekend to land it right rather than pick it back up Monday. Most people who thrive here describe it as the steepest professional growth of their career; the tradeoff is that you won't have a year to perfect any single system before moving to the next problem.

**What you'll do**

- Design, build, and maintain modern web and agentic applications directly for Fortune 500 clients

- Own technical initiatives end-to-end, from architecture through production delivery

- Ramp into unfamiliar client codebases, sometimes large legacy systems, and ship production code with minimal hand-holding

- Operate with high autonomy in ambiguous, fast-moving client environments

- Present technical work and architecture directly to client stakeholders, including senior executives, in a clear, consultative way

- Use modern agentic coding tools as part of your daily workflow to ship at real speed

- Travel to client sites roughly once a month to work in person with stakeholders

**What you must bring**

- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a sweet spot of 3–8 years (no hard cap)

- Demonstrated, hands-on experience personally designing, developing, and shipping modern web or agentic applications to production, not solutions engineering or data-only work

- Experience leading technical initiatives in a high-ownership capacity, as a tech lead, team lead, or founding engineer

- Genuine comfort operating with high autonomy in ambiguous, undefined situations

- Real client-facing or customer-facing experience, including comfort presenting technical work directly to non-technical stakeholders

- Experience with major cloud infrastructure providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure) in production, not just managed platforms

- Willingness to work in-person in New York City, five days a week, at the pace described above

**Nice to have**

- Experience as a co-founder or CTO at a tech startup, or as an early or founding engineer at one

- Having founded or contributed early at a small AI software development practice, even without major commercial traction

- A computer science or engineering degree

- Prior experience in a genuine Forward Deployed Engineer role at another company, where you personally wrote and shipped production code

**Compensation & logistics**

- $180,000 guaranteed base salary, uncapped quarterly performance bonus on top tied directly to shipped work

- Engineers in good standing typically earn meaningful additional bonus income per quarter beyond base; top performers have earned substantially more in strong quarters

- Comprehensive medical (PPO and HSA options), dental, and vision, plus HSA, healthcare FSA, and commuter benefits

- 100% employer-paid life insurance, AD&D, and long-term disability insurance

- Flexible, responsible PTO

- Equity program expected to roll out

- On-site five days a week in New York City

- 20 openings

- Open to visa transfers (H-1B transfer, TN, E-3) — not open to sponsoring new H-1Bs

**This isn't the right fit if**

- Your career has been built entirely at large, brand-name organizations running traditional, slower-moving tech stacks, such as big banks, telecom, or defense contractors

- You've held a "Forward Deployed Engineer" title elsewhere without actually functioning as a hands-on, shipping engineer

- You have an academic-only background, such as a CS master's, with no compensating evidence of shipped, independent work

- You're looking for a standard, predictable 40-hour week rather than an output-driven, occasionally weekend-grinding pace

- You need a full year to polish a system before moving on, rather than shipping fast and iterating in the field