Forward Deployed Engineer

Alfa-Executive Solutions; California (MO); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Alfa-Executive Solutions partners with a rapidly growing AI company in San Francisco to hire a Forward Deployed Engineer who sits at the intersection of engineering, AI, and customers. This role focuses on deploying AI-powered solutions in real-world enterprise environments and requires producing production-grade code and architectures with customer teams.

You will own deployments end-to-end, work directly with enterprise customers to translate complex problems into measurable business value,

Qualifications

• 3–7+ years of strong software engineering experience.
• Experience building production applications and APIs.
• Experience working with LLMs, Generative AI or AI-powered applications.
• Understanding of RAG, agents, embeddings, evaluation and model APIs.
• Experience integrating complex enterprise systems and data sources.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure and modern software architecture.
• Ability to move rapidly from ambiguous customer problem to working solution.
• Experience working directly with enterprise customers or internal business stakeholders.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills.
• A highly commercial mindset — you understand that successful engineering means creating measurable customer value, not simply shipping code.

Responsibilities

• Own complex customer deployments from initial discovery through technical design, build, integration and production rollout.
• Work directly with enterprise customers to identify high-value opportunities for AI and turn them into working production systems.
• Build applications and workflows using LLMs, APIs, agents, retrieval systems and modern AI infrastructure.
• Design integrations between AI platforms and customers’ existing applications, data and technology environments.
• Prototype quickly, test ideas with users and turn successful prototypes into robust production solutions.
• Develop evaluation frameworks to measure model performance and real-world business impact.
• Troubleshoot difficult technical and deployment challenges in customer environments.
• Work closely with Product, Engineering and GTM teams, feeding customer requirements and deployment learnings directly into the product roadmap.
• Help establish repeatable architectures, tooling and deployment patterns that can be reused across customers.
• Become a trusted technical partner to customer engineering, product and executive teams.

Skills

Software fundamentals

Production APIs

LLMs

Generative AI

RAG

Embeddings

Model APIs

Enterprise integration

Cloud infrastructure

Software architecture

Customer exposure

Communication skills

Commercial mindset

Job description

Compensation: $180,000–$240,000 base + equity

Employment: Full-time

The Opportunity

We are partnering with a rapidly growing AI company in San Francisco that is building and deploying advanced AI technology into real-world enterprise environments.

We’re looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) who can sit at the intersection of engineering, AI and the customer.

This isn’t a traditional software engineering role.

You’ll work directly with customers to understand complex business problems, design AI-powered solutions and then build, integrate and deploy those solutions into production.

You’ll be equally comfortable writing production-quality code, whiteboarding an architecture with a customer’s engineering team and explaining the commercial impact of what you’ve built to senior stakeholders.

What You’ll Do

• Own complex customer deployments from initial discovery through technical design, build, integration and production rollout.
• Work directly with enterprise customers to identify high-value opportunities for AI and turn them into working production systems.
• Build applications and workflows using LLMs, APIs, agents, retrieval systems and modern AI infrastructure.
• Design integrations between AI platforms and customers’ existing applications, data and technology environments.
• Prototype quickly, test ideas with users and turn successful prototypes into robust production solutions.
• Develop evaluation frameworks to measure model performance and real-world business impact.
• Troubleshoot difficult technical and deployment challenges in customer environments.
• Work closely with Product, Engineering and GTM teams, feeding customer requirements and deployment learnings directly into the product roadmap.
• Help establish repeatable architectures, tooling and deployment patterns that can be reused across customers.
• Become a trusted technical partner to customer engineering, product and executive teams.

What We’re Looking For

You’ll likely have 3–7+ years of strong software engineering experience and be comfortable operating independently in demanding customer environments.

We’d particularly like to see:

• Excellent software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience building production applications and APIs.
• Experience working with LLMs, Generative AI or AI-powered applications.
• Understanding of areas such as RAG, agents, embeddings, evaluation and model APIs.
• Experience integrating complex enterprise systems and data sources.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure and modern software architecture.
• Ability to move rapidly from ambiguous customer problem to working solution.
• Experience working directly with enterprise customers or internal business stakeholders.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills.
• A highly commercial mindset — you understand that successful engineering means creating measurable customer value, not simply shipping code.

Partially Interesting Backgrounds

We’d be interested in speaking with candidates coming from:

• Solutions Engineering / Solutions Architecture
• Full-Stack or Backend Engineering with significant customer exposure
• Technical Consulting

Previous experience within a high-growth AI company is advantageous but not essential.

We’re more interested in your ability to build, deploy and solve difficult customer problems than having a particular company on your résumé.

Why This Role?

Forward Deployed Engineering is rapidly becoming one of the most important functions within enterprise AI.

You’ll have the opportunity to work directly on production AI deployments, influence product direction and see the technology you build create measurable impact inside major organisations.

This role offers significant autonomy, direct customer exposure and the opportunity to work at the intersection of some of the fastest-moving areas in technology.

Compensation

Plus a competitive equity package and benefits.

Final compensation will depend on experience, technical depth and level.

US Work Authorization

Applicants must already be legally authorized to work in the United States without current or future employer sponsorship.

The company is not able to provide employment visa sponsorship for this position, including new H-1B sponsorship, H-1B transfers or other employer-sponsored work authorization.

Please only apply if you currently hold unrestricted authorization to work in the United States that does not require employer sponsorship.