Client-Facing GenAI & Data Engineer

ApTask; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 170,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

ApTask is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer in the Washington, DC area to blend software and data engineering with hands-on Generative AI, working directly with customers to translate complex problems into technical solutions and deploy them.

The role spans API integrations, ETL pipelines, AI agent development, and rapid prototyping, requiring strong Python, REST API design, and the ability to communicate clearly with senior stakeholders in fast-moving environments.

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on software engineering experience.
• Strong data engineering fundamentals, including ETL/ELT, data modeling, schema mapping, and data pipelines.
• Experience designing and integrating REST APIs and backend services.
• Strong Python development skills.
• Hands-on experience building applications using LLMs / Generative AI.
• Experience building AI agents, RAG systems, tool-calling workflows, LLM-powered applications, or AI workflow automation.
• Ability to take an ambiguous customer requirement and independently turn it into a working technical solution.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills across applications, APIs, infrastructure, and data.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Demonstrated ability to work directly with customers and senior stakeholders.
• Ability to operate effectively in fast-moving environments with incomplete requirements.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers to understand business objectives, operational workflows, technical environments, and pain points.
• Translate ambiguous customer requirements into concrete technical architectures and working solutions.
• Rapidly prototype, build, test, deploy, and iterate on customer-facing solutions.
• Own technical delivery from initial discovery through implementation and production adoption.
• Make pragmatic engineering decisions balancing speed, scalability, security, maintainability, and customer impact.
• Identify technical risks, data-quality issues, integration constraints, and implementation trade-offs early.
• Write production-quality code, primarily using languages such as Python and/or TypeScript.
• Design and develop APIs and backend services.
• Integrate applications with databases, APIs, cloud services, AI models, and customer systems.
• Build lightweight applications and interfaces where needed to deliver an end-to-end customer solution.
• Apply sound software engineering practices around testing, version control, CI/CD, monitoring, security, and documentation.
• Design and implement ETL/ELT pipelines for ingestion, extraction, transformation, and delivery workflows.
• Execute bulk data processing and deliver data products in formats including Parquet, CSV, JSON, and related formats.
• Build, configure, test, and maintain REST/API integrations for customer and internal use cases.
• Design and build GenAI-powered applications that automate complex customer workflows.
• Build LLM-based agents and agentic workflows capable of reasoning across enterprise data, APIs, and tools.
• Develop RAG pipelines connecting LLMs with structured and unstructured enterprise data.
• Implement tool/function calling, structured outputs, workflow orchestration, and multi-step AI systems.
• Build evaluation frameworks and feedback loops to measure and improve AI application quality.

Skills

Strong software engineering

Data engineering fundamentals

REST API design

Python development

LLMs / Generative AI

Customer-facing skills

Problem-solving

Communication skills

Ambiguity management

DevOps / CI-CD

Tools

Snowflake

Databricks

Spark

Kafka

Airflow

dbt

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

ApTask is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer in the Washington, DC area to blend software and data engineering with hands-on Generative AI, working directly with customers to translate complex problems into technical solutions and deploy them.

The role spans API integrations, ETL pipelines, AI agent development, and rapid prototyping, requiring strong Python, REST API design, and the ability to communicate clearly with senior stakeholders in fast-moving environments.