Forward Deployed Engineer

Appen 2; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Appen seeks a Forward Deployed Engineer to design, deploy, and optimize GenAI data solutions with enterprise clients, owning data quality across datasets, pipelines, and automations. This hybrid role in San Francisco requires collaboration with client teams and engineering to deliver scalable workflows with a focus on accuracy, reliability, and performance.

You will translate client needs into concrete requirements and guide stakeholders toward better decisions through hands-on technical

Qualifications

• 3+ years in a customer-facing technical role such as solutions engineering, data consulting, or data operations.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Statistics, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with GenAI, ML, or model evaluation data (LLM training, annotation, evaluation workflows).
• Consultative problem-solving approach guiding stakeholders to better decisions.
• Proficiency in Python and SQL is a plus.
• Ability to work directly with client engineering or ML teams.

Responsibilities

• Act as a trusted consultative partner to clients by defining requirements, clarifying success criteria, shaping high-quality annotation guidelines, and proactively providing insights.
• Translate ambiguous client needs into clear, scalable GenAI data workflows.
• Deliver GenAI datasets meeting defined acceptance and quality criteria.
• Define validation and automation requirements to reduce variance and rework.
• Partner with engineering to build scalable, reproducible pipelines.
• Contribute reusable quality frameworks and validators adopted across projects.

Skills

Customer-facing

GenAI experience

Python

SQL

Client collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering/Data Science

Job description

Role Purpose

The Forward Deployed Engineer works directly with enterprise clients to design, deploy, and optimize GenAI data solutions, with full ownership of final delivered data quality. Embedded across engineering, data operations, and client delivery, this role ensures datasets, pipelines, workflows, and automations meet defined accuracy, reliability, and performance requirements for GenAI model development.

Your Impact

• Act as a trusted consultative partner to clients by defining requirements, clarifying success criteria, shaping high-quality annotation guidelines, and proactively providing insights.
• Influence the what and the why behind GenAI data solutions by translating ambiguous client needs into clear, scalable workflows.
• Deliver GenAI datasets that meet all defined acceptance and quality criteria.
• Define the validation and automation requirements that reduce variance, manual review effort, rework, and time to validation.
• Partner with engineering to build requirements as scalable, reproducible, and observable pipelines.
• Contribute reusable quality frameworks and validators adopted across multiple projects.

What You Bring

• 3+ years of experience in a customer-facing technical role such as solutions engineering, solutions architect, data or technical consulting, or data operations.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience working on GenAI, machine learning, or model evaluation data, including LLM training, annotation, or evaluation workflows.
• A consultative problem-solving approach when leading client conversations, asking sharp questions, and guiding stakeholders toward better decisions.
• Ability to vibe code but proficiency in Python and SQL is a plus
• Confidence in working directly with client engineering or machine learning teams.

Location and Work Arrangement

This is a hybrid role based in San Francisco, CA. You will be required to work from our San Francisco office two days per week.

Why You’ll Love Working Here

At Appen, we foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence. We value curiosity, accountability, and a commitment to delivering the highest-quality AI solutions for frontier models.

You’ll work on complex challenges that shape the future of AI across industries and geographies, alongside talented people in a culture that values humility over ego. You’ll have the flexibility to deliver in a way that works for you and your team, supported by tools, resources and development opportunities to continue to build your capability over time.

About Appen

Appen has been a leader in AI training data for over 30 years. We specialize in human generated data to train, fine tune, and evaluate models across generative AI, large language models, computer vision, and speech recognition. Our AI assisted data annotation platform and global crowd of more than 1 million contributors in over 200 countries support model pre-training, supervised fine tuning, evaluation and benchmarking, safety and red teaming, and multilingual global expansion.