Forward Deployed Engineer – AI

Ikuto; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 270,000 - 330,000; Full time

Job summary

Ikuto seeks a Forward Deployed Engineer in San Francisco to sit between engineering, product, and customers. You’ll own deployments from discovery to production, write production-grade software, and build with LLMs, APIs, and AI tooling.

You’ll prototype quickly, iterate with users, and integrate into complex environments. You’ll collaborate with engineers, product leaders, and senior stakeholders, shaping solutions and influencing product direction with field learnings.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and ability to write production code.
• Experience with LLMs, agentic systems, AI-assisted development is valuable.
• Comfortable with customers; explain technical concepts clearly and build trust.

Responsibilities

• Own technical customer deployments from discovery through production.
• Write and ship production-quality software.
• Build with LLMs, agentic systems, model APIs and modern AI tooling.
• Prototype rapidly and iterate directly with users.
• Integrate into complex customer environments and existing systems.
• Work directly with engineers, product leaders and senior customer stakeholders.
• Feed learnings in the field into the core product.
• Help establish playbooks for Forward Deployed Engineering as the team scales.

Skills

Python

LLMs

Agentic systems

APIs

Tools

APIs

Job description

San Francisco | On-site | Up to $300k Base + Equity

We're hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer for a fast-growing, heavily funded AI company in San Francisco.

The business has raised significant funding from some of the world's leading technology investors, is already generating multi-million-dollar revenue, and has its technology deployed with major enterprise customers.

This is not an AI company still searching for product-market fit. There is significant customer demand today, and the challenge is building and deploying quickly enough to service it.

That's where this role comes in.

The opportunity

You’ll sit directly between engineering, product and the customer.

You’ll work with customers to understand difficult, often ambiguous problems, determine what should be built, and then get hands‑on and build it.

That could mean developing AI agents and workflows, integrating models and APIs, working with complex or unstructured data, rapidly prototyping new solutions, or turning something originally built for one customer into a scalable product capability.

You’ll have considerable autonomy. Rather than receiving perfectly written tickets, you’ll often be given a problem and expected to work out the solution.

Expect to:

• Own technical customer deployments from discovery through to production
• Write and ship production-quality software
• Build with LLMs, AI agents, model APIs and modern AI tooling
• Prototype rapidly and iterate directly with users
• Integrate into complex customer environments and existing systems
• Work directly with engineers, product leaders and senior customer stakeholders
• Feed what you learn in the field directly into the core product
• Help establish the playbooks and processes for Forward Deployed Engineering as the team scales

This is a builder role first and foremost. It isn't project management, traditional implementation consulting or a customer success position with a technical title.

The profiles we’re interested in

There isn’t a single route into this role. In fact, some of the most interesting candidates probably won’t have “Forward Deployed Engineer” on their CV.

The FDE

You’re already working in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering or a similar technical deployment role. You can scope with customers, code, deploy and own the relationship end‑to‑end.

The Product‑Minded Software Engineer

You’re a strong backend, full‑stack or product engineer who wants to get closer to customers. You’ve built and shipped meaningful products and you’re comfortable turning ambiguous problems into working software.

The Founding Engineer / Technical Founder

You’ve built from zero. You’ve spoken to users, made product decisions, written the code and shipped without a large organisation around you. You thrive when there’s no obvious playbook.

The Technical Solutions Engineer

You’re unusually technical for a traditional Solutions/Implementation Engineer. You don’t just configure software or run demos — you can genuinely build, code, integrate APIs and solve difficult customer problems yourself.

The Exceptional Early‑Career Engineer

You may only have a couple of years’ experience, but the signals are unusually strong: excellent engineering fundamentals, standout internships or companies, a strong CS/STEM background, impressive projects, research, competitive programming or something else that demonstrates exceptional technical ability.

What we’re really looking for

The common thread is technical ability + communication + agency.

You’ll need strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to write production code. Python is particularly relevant, although exceptional engineers from other modern stacks are absolutely worth speaking to.

Experience with LLMs, agentic systems, applied AI or AI-assisted development is valuable, but we’re more interested in whether you can learn quickly and build difficult things than whether your CV contains every keyword.

Just as importantly, you need to be comfortable with customers. You should be able to explain technical concepts clearly, ask intelligent questions, build trust and work out what somebody actually needs rather than simply what they’ve asked for.

We’re particularly interested in people coming from high‑growth VC‑backed technology companies, elite engineering environments, early‑stage startups, founding teams or other places where you’ve had genuine ownership.

The timing is particularly compelling.

The company has significant capital behind it, meaningful revenue already coming through the door and genuine enterprise demand — while remaining early enough that individual engineers can have an outsized impact.

You’ll be working on applied AI systems that reach production and solve real customer problems, rather than prototypes that never leave a lab.

You’ll work alongside an exceptionally strong technical team, have direct exposure to customers and company leadership, and own problems across the full lifecycle from 'what should we build?' to 'it’s live.'

As the Forward Deployed Engineering organisation grows, there’s also significant opportunity to help define how the function operates and take on increasing ownership.

Compensation: up to $300,000 base + meaningful equity

If you’re a strong engineer who wants more ownership, more customer exposure and the opportunity to build at the frontier of applied AI, we’d like to hear from you.