Forward Deployed Architect - AI - Austin, Texas

Stax - Deep Tech Talent; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Stax Talent is partnering with a Series A, AI-native company to hire a Forward Deployed Architect. You will own end-to-end delivery of AI-driven business transformation for enterprise clients, with a strong emphasis on customer engagement and hands-on coding.

This role is genuinely client-facing and requires designing AI-driven solutions, building integrations, leading live demos, and collaborating across pre-sales, customer success, engineering, and product. Travel up to 50% for on-site work.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in software development, AI/ML engineering, or technical consulting with customer-facing experience.

Responsibilities

• Design AI-driven transformation solutions and architect against customer needs.
• Build and configure AI agents, workflows, and integrations reusable across customers.
• Own requirements gathering directly with customers, translating needs into technical specifications.
• Lead live demos, rapid prototyping, and iterate based on customer feedback.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor on AI agent architecture, performance, and scalability.
• Tune prompts, logic, and agent configurations for accuracy and reliability.
• Travel up to 50% for on-site discovery, deployment, and customer engagement.

Skills

Customer-facing

AI/ML engineering

Enterprise architecture

AWS/GCP/Azure

CI/CD / DevOps

APIs and webhooks

Data-driven mindset

Excellent communication

BS/MS in CS/Eng

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or Engineering

AI certifications (TOGAF/SAFe)

Job description

Stax Talent is partnering with a Series A, AI-native company (backed by top-tier Silicon Valley VCs, $150M+ raised) to hire a Forward Deployed Architect - a hands-on, customer-facing technical architect who owns the end-to-end delivery of AI-driven business transformation projects for enterprise clients.

About the company

Our client is building the future of work with an AI teammate that unifies data, tools, and workflows into a single AI-ready platform - giving employees real-time insights, proactive suggestions, and agentic actions. Their AI-native apps and agents work alongside customer teams to eliminate repetitive work and break down silos between people and systems.

About the role

This is a genuinely customer-facing position: you'll spend 30-50% of your time working directly with customers, and 30-50%+ hands-on coding. You'll partner with pre-sales teams to scope technical integration strategies, then own execution once opportunities move to post-sales - building proofs-of-concept, custom integrations, and solution prototypes that prove out technical feasibility.

You'll act as the connective tissue between pre-sales, customer success, engineering, and product - bringing AI capabilities to life for real customers with real business problems.

What you'll do

• Design AI-driven business transformation solutions and architect against customer needs
• Build and configure AI agents, workflows, and integrations (snap-ins, connectors, APIs) that are reusable across customers
• Own requirements gathering directly with customers, translating needs into technical specifications
• Lead live demos, rapid prototyping, and iterate based on customer feedback
• Act as a trusted technical advisor on AI agent architecture, performance, and scalability
• Tune prompts, logic, and agent configurations for accuracy and reliability
• Travel up to 50% for on-site discovery, deployment, and customer engagement

What you'll bring

• 5+ years in software development, AI/ML engineering, or technical consulting - with genuine customer-facing experience essential
• Applied AI knowledge: LLMs, prompt engineering, RAG, function calling, and building evals for agentic AI solutions - you can speak fluently to what you've built, what broke, and the trade-offs you made
• Demonstrated enterprise architecture experience, with security, scalability, and identity management considerations front of mind
• Hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure at enterprise scale, plus modern DevOps practice (CI/CD, containers, observability)
• Comfortable integrating systems via APIs, webhooks, and event/data pipelines
• A data-driven mindset - comfortable using A/B testing and telemetry to guide decisions
• Excellent written and verbal communication, able to flex between engineers and business stakeholders
• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; AI/architecture certifications (e.g. TOGAF, SAFe) a plus