Forward Deployed Engineer, Hong Kong at a Breakout AI Unicorn

Harper; Hong Kong; On-site; HKD 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Job summary

Harper in Hong Kong seeks an experienced Forward Deployed Engineer to work directly with enterprise teams, learning how their operations run and building AI-enabled production systems.

You will lead projects from discovery through deployment, measure real-world impact, and iterate until outcomes are clearly improved. This role requires strong technical foundations and comfort working with customers in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building software or solving complex technical problems.
• Strong foundations in software architecture and system design.
• Experience with APIs, data flows, and distributed systems.
• Ability bring structure to ambiguous problems.
• Comfort working directly with customers and stakeholders.
• Clear communication and ownership mindset.
• Genuine curiosity about applied AI and its business value.

Responsibilities

• Embed with customers to understand workflows, constraints, and success metrics.
• Turn operational problems into actionable technical plans and production systems.
• Design and build AI agents that integrate with tools, data, and business processes.
• Own deployments from prototype to launch, monitoring, and improvement.
• Test with real-world data, measure outcomes, and iterate based on evidence.
• Make pragmatic tradeoffs across architecture, reliability, speed, and user experience.
• Partner with Product and Engineering teams to improve the core platform.
• Turn deployment lessons into reusable tools and patterns.

Skills

Software architecture

System design

Production engineering

APIs & data flows

Distributed systems

Customer-facing

Tools

APIs

Observability

Job description

Job Title

Forward Deployed Engineer

Salary

Top-of-market compensation.

Location

Hong Kong, on-site.

Company Description

The client hit a $5B valuation in under two years, on more than $800M raised — $2B to $5B in the last six months alone. Its AI agents run enterprise customer operations across voice, chat, and email — tens of thousands of requests a day, resolving more than 80% of conversations without handing off to a human and cutting handling times by up to 60%. Agents go from pilot to production in days to weeks, and more than 70% of enterprises expand into additional workflows within three months. It is live in 35+ countries and puts a local engineering team in every market it deploys in, rather than serving them remotely. Hong Kong is one of the markets opening now: the site's technical lead has just been hired, and this is the engineer the customer sees, the one who makes the product real in production.

What You'll Do

This is not traditional product engineering. You are paired directly with enterprise teams: you learn how their operations actually run, identify where AI can create meaningful value, and build the systems that deliver it. You lead projects from initial discovery through production deployment, then measure real-world impact and keep iterating until the solution delivers meaningful results.

• Embed with customers to understand their workflows, constraints, and measures of success.
• Turn loosely defined operational problems into clear technical plans and production systems.
• Design and build AI agents that integrate with customer tools, data, and business processes.
• Own deployments from prototype through launch, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
• Test with real-world data, measure business outcomes, and iterate based on evidence.
• Make pragmatic tradeoffs across architecture, reliability, speed, and user experience.
• Partner closely with the client's Product and Engineering teams to improve the core platform.
• Turn lessons from individual deployments into reusable tools, patterns, and best practices.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building software or solving complex technical problems.
• Strong foundations in software architecture, system design, and production engineering.
• Experience working across APIs, integrations, data flows, and distributed systems.
• The ability to bring structure and momentum to ambiguous problems.
• Confidence working directly with customers, from operational teams to technical stakeholders.
• Clear communication, sound judgment, and a strong sense of ownership.
• Genuine curiosity about applied AI and its potential to transform how businesses operate.

Nice to Have

• A forward-deployed, solutions engineering, consulting, or customer-facing technical background.
• Experience building AI agents, workflow automation, or conversational systems.
• Familiarity with LLM evaluation, observability, and reliability in production.
• Experience deploying and improving systems in complex enterprise environments.

Why Join

• You are the technical owner of the account, not a ticket in someone's backlog. First call to production is yours.
• Hong Kong is opening now and the site's technical lead is already in place. You are the market's next technical hire, and the first production deployments are yours to build.
• The agents you build resolve more than 80% of the conversations they handle and cut handling times by up to 60%. This is production, not pilots.
• You ship on a model-agnostic platform with evaluation harnesses and self-healing agent design, at a company that went from zero to a $5B valuation in under two years and is live in 35+ countries.