Forward Deployed Engineer

Preacta Recruitment; City of Melbourne; On-site; AUD 160,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Superannuation

Job summary

An early-stage Melbourne AI company is looking for an engineering role that blends hands-on product delivery with strong customer engagement. You will take a new customer from kickoff to live, collaborating with product and growth teams to define success and deliver the agent behaviour and integration.

Post-launch, you’ll analyse usage data and conversations to show impact, refine features, and speed future rollouts.

Qualifications

• Hands-on engineering with customer-facing responsibilities and real impact.
• Experience with large language models and agentic systems is preferred.
• Ability to turn ambiguous problems into prototypes and polished releases.
• Comfort working with security reviews and multiple stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead a customer from kickoff to live deployment with product and growth teams.
• Tune live voice and screen behaviour and drive improvement from usage data.
• Build internal tooling to speed up each rollout and iteration.
• Coordinate with big customers, manage edge cases and maintain momentum.

Skills

Customer-facing skills

LLMs & agentic systems

End-to-end deployment

Prototype to release

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

WebRTC

Kubernetes

TypeScript

Svelte

Python

GCP

Job description

FDE - 160k-220k + Super + Equity
Melbourne

Full description

Company overview

An early-stage Melbourne AI company with a small but powerful team and a customer list most startups would envy, including Google and Canva. Their product is a live conversational agent that guides users through software in real time. It's in production now, and the roadmap is growing fast. Founders are in the room, decisions are quick, and what you see in the field shapes what gets built next.

Role and responsibilities

This is a hands-on, customer-facing engineering role. You'll take a new customer from kickoff to live, working with their product and growth teams to define what success looks like, then building the agent behaviour and integration to deliver it. After launch, you'll dig into usage data and conversations to show the impact and recommend what to improve. You'll tune live voice and screen behaviour once real users get hold of it, and build internal tooling so each rollout is faster than the last. Large customers bring security reviews, multiple stakeholders and edge cases, and you'll keep everything moving. Your learnings go straight back into the core product.

Key technical skills

• Engineer at heart, comfortable across the stack
• Strong customer-facing skills, equally at ease with a client's product leads and a codebase
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs and agentic systems
• Solutions engineering, implementation, technical consulting or prior FDE background is a big plus
• Able to turn an ambiguous problem into a working prototype, then a polished release
• Stack includes WebRTC, Kubernetes, TypeScript, Svelte, Python and GCP, but sharp generalists are welcome

Location and package

Melbourne CBD. In office 4 days a week, with occasional customer visits. $160k to $220k plus super plus equity.