AI Engineer

Xcede; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Job summary

Xcede is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer in San Francisco. The role leads design, build, and deployment of enterprise AI systems, serving as a senior technical owner across customer engagements and shaping architecture for durable production solutions.

Day-to-day you will guide discovery, create reference architectures, mentor engineers, and translate field learnings into reusable delivery patterns within a hybrid environment.

Qualifications

• Senior software engineer with production systems experience.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture, production readiness for customer LLM systems

Skills

Leadership

Mentoring

Communication

Architectural design

Customer outcomes ownership

Tools

Python

SQL

LLMs

API development

Cloud infrastructure

Retrieval

Job description

Job Description

Forward Deployed Engineer

Location

San Francisco (Hybrid — 3 days/week in office)

Compensation

$170K–$400K base + equity

Travel

Up to 50%, including on-site client work

About the Company

We're working with a newly launched AI deployment company, purpose-built to deliver enterprise AI transformation at scale. As model capabilities accelerate, deployment has become the primary bottleneck to realizing AI's value inside large enterprises. We exist to close that gap.

We sit at the intersection of frontier AI, enterprise transformation, and scaled delivery - partnering with many of the world's largest and most influential companies to solve their hardest business problems using the latest advances in AI.

About the Role

We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to lead the design, build, and deployment of enterprise AI systems. You'll operate as a senior technical owner across customer engagements, shaping architecture, setting engineering standards, and helping teams move from prototype to durable production systems. This is one of the few places to work with startup-level autonomy while building for the scale and complexity of the world's largest enterprises.

Day to day, you'll lead technical discovery, design solution architecture, build production-grade agentic AI applications, mentor engineers, evaluate model behavior, and turn field learnings into reusable delivery patterns.

What You'll Do

• Own architecture, implementation quality, evaluation strategy, and production readiness for customer LLM systems
• Build AI applications, agents, and workflow tools using LLMs, retrieval, orchestration, APIs, and production software practices
• Guide engineers through ambiguous technical problems - reviewing designs, code, and tradeoffs
• Work directly with customer technical and business stakeholders to translate workflows into reliable AI systems
• Prototype quickly, then harden what works into reusable reference architectures
• Design evaluation and monitoring approaches for quality, reliability, and trust
• Feed field insights back into product and research priorities

What We're Looking For

• Senior software engineering experience building production applications, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure
• Strong Python and SQL for building robust data applications in enterprise settings
• Production LLM experience - agents, retrieval, evaluation, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, model integration
• Track record taking projects from prototype to production while keeping a high bar
• Comfortable as a hands-on player-coach: writing code, reviewing designs, mentoring, owning customer outcomes
• Strong communication across executive, customer, product, and engineering audiences
• Good judgment on standardization vs. bespoke work
• Calm under pressure, turning messy deployment problems into repeatable patterns
• Forward-deployed backgrounds especially valued; direct pre-sales exposure a plus, not required