Forward Deployed Engineer (AI)

Elios, Inc.; Houston (TX); Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Elios, Inc. is seeking a hands-on engineer with consulting experience to understand client workflows, define problems, and deliver production-ready AI-powered software. You will communicate clearly with clients, learn new domains quickly, and balance quality with speed.

Remote from the Houston area with moderate travel. You will own delivery, explain value and risks, and work with AWS, Azure, or GCP in client environments.

Qualifications

• Certification as Forward Deployed Engineer is preferred and will be assessed.
• Proven consulting experience delivering technical work for external clients.
• Hands-on software engineering with substantial coding without AI assistance.
• Experience shipping and supporting production software.
• Experience building AI-enabled applications and evaluating behavior.
• Hands-on deployment experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Comfort presenting to senior executives and discussing implementation details.

Responsibilities

• Understand client workflows, define the problem, and agree on success criteria.
• Support discovery and sales conversations; explain business value, risks, and tradeoffs to engineers, business stakeholders, and executives.
• Own commitments, communicate progress, and raise delivery risks early.
• Build AI-powered software, agents, and integrations in real client environments.
• Take solutions from proof of concept through production, with testing, security, access controls, observability, and deployment handoff.
• Deploy to the client’s cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Read, review, debug, and maintain the code you ship, including AI-generated code.
• Use agentic coding tools daily while owning architecture, implementation, and quality.

Skills

Forward Deployed Engineer

Consulting experience

Hands-on software engineering

AI-enabled applications

Cloud deployment

AWS/Azure/GCP

Executive communication

Houston residency

Job description

We’re looking for a hands‑on engineer with consulting experience who can understand a client’s business, build the right solution, and get it into production. Above all, you communicate exceptionally well with clients, learn unfamiliar domains and technologies quickly, and bring excellent taste and sound judgment. You know what’s worth building, what good looks like, and when to challenge an approach. You’ll work remotely from the Houston area, with moderate travel for client kickoffs, onsite delivery, discovery workshops, and sales meetings in Houston and elsewhere.

Responsibilities

Client-accountable consulting

• Understand client workflows, define the problem, and agree on success criteria.
• Support discovery and sales conversations. Explain business value, options, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to engineers, business stakeholders, and CEOs.
• Own your commitments, communicate progress, and raise delivery risks early.
• Build AI-powered software, agents, and integrations in real client environments.
• Take solutions from proof of concept through production, with appropriate testing, evaluations, security, access controls, observability, and operational handoff.
• Deploy to the cloud the client uses, drawing on hands‑on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Read, review, debug, and maintain the code you ship, including code generated by AI.

Team delivery and AI fluency

• Use agentic coding tools daily while owning architecture, implementation choices, and quality.
• Work effectively with client teams and our colleagues, and transfer knowledge throughout delivery.
• Adapt to unfamiliar codebases, languages, and constraints. Know when to investigate, ask for help, or challenge an approach.

Qualifications

• Candidates with our current Forward Deployed Engineer certification receive priority consideration and satisfy this role’s technical assessment requirement. We’ll assess consulting experience, client‑facing delivery, and role fit separately. Learn more through our Academy on this website.

Required Skills

• Consulting experience delivering technical work for external clients is required.
• Several years of hands‑on software engineering, including substantial experience coding without AI assistance.
• Experience shipping and supporting production software. You can explain what separates a convincing demo from reliable, scalable enterprise software.
• Practical experience building AI‑enabled applications and evaluating their behavior.
• Hands‑on deployment experience with at least one of AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Confidence presenting to senior executives and discussing implementation details with engineers.
• Houston‑area residency and willingness to travel moderately for client work.

Preferred Skills

• Experience leading delivery for external clients is highly desired.

Our quality bar

• You stand behind every deliverable. You understand, review, and validate what you ship, whether you wrote it yourself or used AI. You catch weak reasoning, brittle code, confusing interfaces, and polished‑looking work that doesn’t solve the problem. You don’t pass that burden to the client.

You should apply if

• You use agentic coding tools every day and keep exploring how to use them better.
• You love a difficult challenge and care about delivering quality to your clients.
• An unfamiliar codebase or language makes you curious rather than stops you.
• You can recognize good code, challenge bad code, and explain your decisions.
• You don’t outsource your thinking to AI.