Forward Deployed Engineer

Kinetic IT; Canberra; On-site; AUD 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Kinetic IT is building its AI Engineering & Platforms division with four founding Forward Deployed Engineer roles. You will embed with the client to identify friction, design AI-enabled workflows, and ship production software rapidly.

You’ll own outcomes from discovery through adoption, backed by platform and leadership support. These are senior, high‑ownership roles requiring autonomy, strong engineering fundamentals, and a focus on delivering measurable customer value within enterprise

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: architecture, testing, and production readiness.
• Hands-on depth with modern AI – LLMs, agents, retrieval, evals.
• Evidence of shipped outcomes under ambiguity and resistance.
• Instinct for productisation and reusable platform patterns.
• Strong customer-facing communication and workshop facilitation.
• Understanding enterprise data, identity, security and governance considerations.

Responsibilities

• Discovering and framing high‑value AI use cases from inside the operation, working with stakeholders to choose what’s worth building.
• Building AI‑enabled systems end‑to‑end – agentic systems, RAG, automation workflows, API integrations.
• Prototyping, testing and iterating quickly, balancing security, reliability, usability and cost.
• Productising learnings into reusable patterns and platform capability for scale.

Skills

TypeScript

React

Node.js

Python

C#

Java

Tools

Azure

AWS

Google Cloud

Job description

Overview

We have four founding Forward Deployed Engineer roles open in Kinetic IT’s newly formed AI Engineering & Platforms division. These are the first AI Product Engineering roles in the team – you’ll be building it from scratch, with frontier AI at your fingertips and 26 years of Kinetic IT customer trust behind you from day one.

Mandate

Embedded inside a client’s operation, you’ll sit next to the people who do the work and find the friction that stands between skilled people and their best work: the manual reconciliations, the status chased across half a dozen systems. Then you’ll make the frictions disappear – working software shipped into the customer’s environment in days, not quarters – and you’ll sit next to the people using it and watch the three‑hour task become three minutes. The brief, in four words: find friction, drive value.

Nobody hands you a spec; finding what’s worth building is the job. You’ll surface the use cases that are both valuable and critical, stand‑up proofs of concept fast, and let impact decide – the winners move into production, with the rest of Kinetic IT behind you.

These are senior, high‑ownership roles: autonomy, ownership, and exposure.

Mandate – Work Scope

• Discovering and framing high‑value AI use cases from inside the operation – living the customer’s day, working with their stakeholders from frontline operators to executives, and choosing what’s worth building.
• Building AI‑enabled systems end‑to‑end – agentic systems, RAG, automation workflows, APIs and integrations – using frontier models across Azure, AWS and Google Cloud, deployed into whatever stack the customer already runs. No tech religion: the tech serves the outcome – never the other way around.
• Prototyping, testing and iterating quickly, then hardening what proves value – balancing security, reliability, usability, cost and speed to value throughout.
• Productising what you learn – driving adoption (training teams, reshaping workflows around the new capability), then generalising what worked into reusable patterns, accelerators and platform capability – so value delivered at one customer becomes value delivered at scale.

You can read more and interact with our website dedicated to this work at https://forward-deployed-engineer.ai

WEIGH THIS HONESTLY BEFORE APPLYING

Travel is real and national. Roughly a week at a time on site with your account, multiple times a quarter, more around go‑lives – wherever the customer’s operation runs. When you’re not with your customer, there’s real flexibility – we care about the value you drive, not where you sit.

Zero to one in days. Discovery to first working demo in days, not quarters. Production software in the customer’s environment – their data, their security review, their constraints. Everyone can see whether it’s moving.

The outcome is yours. You own the outcome at the account end‑to‑end – from discovery through build, production, and adoption. You’ll be backed by platform, security, account and leadership support, but you’ll own the outcome from discovery through build, production and adoption.

Trust is the asset. Kinetic IT has spent twenty‑six years earning trust inside its customers’ operations. Everything we ship must enhance that trust – never compromise it. You’ll earn your own the same way it was built: by delivering, reliably, inside someone else’s critical environment.

KEEN TO BE CONSIDERED?

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: you can architect, build and ship production systems alone, across the stack, in unfamiliar environments. We default to TypeScript, React, and Node to move fast – and we meet customers wherever they already run: Python, C#, Java, .NET. Comfort in enterprise stacks like Microsoft and ServiceNow is a big plus.
• Hands‑on depth with modern AI – LLMs, agents, retrieval, evals – and the judgement to tell the thing that demos well from the thing that actually works in production.
• Value‑first judgement – no tech religion. You’re genuinely excited by the frontier and fluent in the latest tooling – and just as happy solving the problem with something vanilla, or in a stack that wasn’t your first choice, when that delivers the customer’s outcome fastest.
• Evidence of shipped outcomes under ambiguity. Not projects – outcomes: something that worked, that mattered to someone, that you drove against resistance.
• An instinct for productisation. You spot the reusable capability behind the specific fix, and you build so the next deployment is faster than the last.
• Confidence in customer‑facing communication: you can support discovery, run workshops, explain technical options, hold a room of senior executives and earn trust with frontline operators – in the same day. Genuine, not salesy.
• A good understanding of enterprise data, identity, security and governance considerations, including secure data access, privacy, observability, guardrails and human‑in‑the‑loop controls.

About Kinetic IT

AI Engineering & Platforms is a newly formed division within Kinetic IT, working in partnership with our strategy, change management, commercial and account teams. The division looks at everything through one lens – customer value: value first, value fast, value at scale – with frontier AI and serious engineering behind it, never in front of it.

• Value first: we start with the customer problem, not the technology. Every build is judged by the outcome it delivers – cycle time reduced, backlog cleared, cost removed, risk lowered or hours returned to frontline teams.
• Value fast: FDEs embed at one customer, find the problem that matters and build a working solution into their environment – narrow, safe, observable and useful first, hardened next.
• Value at scale: what generalises becomes shared platform capability, so value delivered for one customer becomes faster, stronger and more repeatable for the next.

How to Apply

• Proof you build: GitHub, a product, a demo, an architecture note, a shipped system – or an anonymised artefact if your work is confidential.
• One outcome story (half a page): what was broken, who it hurt, the resistance you faced, what you shipped, what changed for the people using it, and what number moved. Specifics over polish.

Apply with the links above or deviate via our website: https://forward-deployed-engineer.ai

You can learn more about our culture and crew online at https://kineticit.com.au/work-with-us/careers-at-kit/.