*Forward Deployed Engineer*

Accenture Australia; City of Melbourne; Hybrid; AUD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

18 weeks paid parental leave

Flexible Work Arrangements

Career development program

Global career opportunities

Job summary

Accenture Australia is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to drive enterprise AI delivery from discovery to production. You’ll own client engagements, architect AI systems, and ensure they scale securely for real-world use.

You’ll work across Claude, GPT and Gemini, designing pipelines and responsible for production-grade implementations. Leadership and mentoring accompany the role, with a focus on rapid, impactful outcomes.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in CS, Engineering, or related field.
• 10+ years in software engineering or solutions architecture.
• 3+ years delivering AI/ML or LLM-based solutions in production.
• Proven track record leading complex, customer-facing technical engagements.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical relationship with enterprise clients from discovery through production.
• Run workshops to identify high-value AI use cases and translate business problems into engineering plans.
• Architect and ship enterprise-grade AI systems using Claude, GPT, Gemini etc., chosen for the problem.
• Mentor engineers, set technical direction, and lead incident resolution and complex troubleshooting.

Skills

Enterprise leadership

AI/ML in production

Cloud platforms

LLM integration

Observability & CI/CD

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in CS/Engineering

10+ years software engineering/architecture

3+ years AI/LLM production

Tools

Claude

GPT

Gemini

Snowflake

Job description

About Accenture

Accenture is a leading solutions and services company that helps the world’s leading enterprises reinvent by building their digital core and unleashing the power of AI to create value at speed across the enterprise, bringing together the talent of our approximately 786,000 people, our proprietary assets and platforms, and deep ecosystem relationships. Our strategy is to be the reinvention partner of choice for our clients and to be the most client-focused, AI-enabled, great place to work in the world. Through our Reinvention Services we bring together our capabilities across strategy, consulting, technology, operations, Song and Industry X with our deep industry expertise to create and deliver solutions and services for our clients. Our purpose is to deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity, and we measure our success by the 360 value we create for all our stakeholders. Visit us at www.accenture.com.

What You’ll Do

The most interesting engineering problems right now aren't just inside big tech companies, they're inside enterprises trying to figure out how AI actually fits into the way they work. As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll work directly with enterprise clients to change how their organisations operate by designing and shipping AI systems that deliver real outcomes. You'll own delivery end-to-end, from the first whiteboard session with a CTO to a production system handling real load. You'll work across the best available tooling (Claude, GPT, Gemini etc.) choosing what's right for the problem rather than defaulting to one stack. You'll design pipelines and agentic workflows that have to meet enterprise standards for security, scale, and reliability. You'll do this while mentoring engineers, shaping our internal practices, and becoming the kind of trusted advisor that clients build their AI roadmaps around. This role suits someone who is equally at home in a technical deep-dive and a boardroom. Someone who finds half-solved problems energising. Someone who wants their work to be visible, consequential, and fast-moving.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Client Leadership

• Own the technical relationship with enterprise clients from initial discovery through to production, including C-suite engagement and long-term roadmap influence.
• Run workshops that identify and prioritise high-value AI use cases, translating business problems into concrete engineering plans.

Solution Design & Delivery

• Architect and ship enterprise-grade AI systems using the best available tooling (Claude, GPT, Gemini etc.) chosen for the problem, not the default.
• Design pipelines and agentic workflows that meet real enterprise requirements: security, scalability, cost efficiency, and reliability at production load.
• Integrate LLMs with complex enterprise data environments, including cloud platforms and data warehouses.

Technical Leadership

• Set the technical direction on engagements, making the hard calls on architecture, tooling, and trade-offs.
• Mentor engineers on both sides of the client relationship, raising the standard of the whole team.
• Lead incident resolution and complex troubleshooting.

Governance & Operational Excellence

• Define evaluation frameworks that assess model quality, safety, and business impact.
• Implement LLMOps practices including monitoring, observability, and drift detection in production environments.
• Ensure every deployment meets enterprise security and compliance requirements from day one.

Here’s What You Need

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, solutions architecture, or technical consulting
• 3+ years delivering AI/ML or LLM-based solutions in production
• Proven track record of leading complex, customer-facing technical engagements

Technical Skills

Programming & Engineering

You write production-quality code and have strong opinions about what that means. You're expert-level in at least one language and comfortable picking up others as the problem demands. You understand distributed systems and API design deeply enough to spot architectural risk early, and you've lived through enough incidents to know why observability and CI/CD hygiene matter.

LLM & AI Platforms

You have hands-on experience with Claude, GPT, and Gemini in production, not just demos. You understand the real trade-offs between models: cost, latency, context limits, reasoning quality, and where each breaks down. You know prompt engineering beyond the basics, have built RAG pipelines that handle messy real-world data, and have worked with agentic frameworks and MCP. Vector database selection and chunking strategy aren't abstract concepts to you.

Cloud & Data Technologies

You're strong on at least one major cloud platform (e.g. AWS, Azure, or GCP) and you understand how enterprise infrastructure constraints shape what you can actually deploy. You've worked with containerisation and orchestration in production environments, not just local Docker setups.

Data Platforms

You're comfortable working across the data stack, whether that's Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or something bespoke. You know enough to integrate LLMs with complex data environments without needing a data engineer to translate for you.

Bonus points if with

• Experience deploying AI solutions in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, or government
• Familiarity with responsible AI and model risk management frameworks
• Contributions to open-source projects or technical publications
• Experience with evaluation and observability tools such as LangSmith, Promptfoo, or Weights & Biases
• Prior experience in a startup or high-growth technology environment

Benefits of working at Accenture

• 18 weeks paid parental leave
• Long & short-term career break opportunities
• Structured career development program
• Local and international career opportunities.
• Certified as a Family Inclusive Workplace™
• Flexible Work Arrangements - centered around Accenture’s Truly Human ethos and our commitment to supporting the health and wellbeing of our people.
• We are proud to be in the top 3 of last year’s Diversity & Inclusion Index!

We are a WORK180 Endorsed Employer, to see our benefits and policies.

All our consulting professionals receive comprehensive training covering business acumen, technical and professional skills development. You’ll also have opportunities to hone your functional skills and expertise in an area of specialization. We offer a variety of formal and informal training programs at every level to help you acquire and build specialized skills faster. Learning takes place both on the job and through formal training conducted online, in the classroom, or in collaboration with teammates. The sheer variety of work we do, and the experience it offers, provide an unbeatable platform from which to build a career.

Equal Employment Opportunity At Accenture, we recognise that our people are multi-dimensional, and we create a work environment where all people feel like they can bring their authentic selves to work, every day. Our unwavering commitment to inclusion and diversity unleashes innovation and creates a culture where everyone feels they have equal opportunity. Our range of progressive policies support flexibility in ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ our people work to ensure that Accenture is an organisation where you can strive for more, achieve great things and maintain the balance and wellbeing you need. We encourage applications from all people, and we are committed to removing barriers to the recruitment process and employee lifecycle. All employment decisions shall be made without regard to age, disability status, ethnicity, gender, gender identity or expression, religion or sexual orientation and we do not tolerate discrimination. If you require adjustments to the recruitment process or have a preferred communication method, please email [e-mail] and cite the relevant Job Number, or contact us on [phone]. To ensure our workplace is inclusive and diverse we are setting bold goals and taking comprehensive action. To achieve these goals, we collect information that allows us to track the effectiveness of our Inclusion and Diversity programs. Learn how Accenture protects your personal data and know your rights in relation to your personal data.