Forward Deployed Engineer – Applied AI & Search

ChapsVision; Columbus (OH); Hybrid; USD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

401(k) plan

Generous time-off policy

Annual learning and wellness stipend

Job summary

ChapsVision is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer for the North America Professional Services team in Columbus, Ohio. This hybrid role involves working closely with a major customer to deliver AI-powered solutions.

The ideal candidate has extensive experience in production programming and agent orchestration, capable of translating business needs into effective delivery plans. Full benefits package and the opportunity to shape future platforms are provided.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in a customer-facing technical role.
• Experience with agentic platforms and orchestration.
• Solid programming skills in Python and C#.

Responsibilities

• Embed with the customer, acting as the main point for strategy and delivery.
• Lead technical discovery and architecture discussions.
• Ship production artifacts and manage indexing for enterprise search.

Skills

Agentic platform experience

Technical account leadership

Production programming in Python

AI system deployment

Enterprise search expertise

Manufacturing domain knowledge

High-context communication

Tools

Elasticsearch

Python

C#

TypeScript

Job description

About ChapsVision & Sinequa

We build the enterprise platform for AI-powered search and agentic orchestration. The goal is straightforward: give every employee fast, governed access to the right information, in the right context, when they need it, with tight control over how AI uses it.

Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) – North America Professional Services

As part of the North America Professional Services team, you'll be the FDE embedded on-site with one of our largest and most strategic customers, a global manufacturing leader running a multi-year co‑innovation program to put agentic AI in the hands of its workforce at scale. It’s a hybrid role: business lead and technical lead in one. You’ll own the translation of the customer’s priorities into Sinequa delivery, and of platform capability into outcomes its teams actually adopt. You’ll build production‑grade applications, help shape the platform roadmap from the field, and work across the customer’s stakeholders, its embedded delivery team, and our R&D group.

What Makes This Role Different

You’ll own a single flagship account from start to finish, building against real production data (drawings, specifications, parts, PLM) rather than demo environments. Because this deployment shapes how we scale, what you work out here will become the blueprint for the next wave of strategic customers. The strongest parts of what you build can make their way into the core platform roadmap, so your field work reaches every customer we have. You’ll have real ownership of the account, with the platform, the R&D relationships, and company resources behind you.

What You Will Do

• Embed with the customer: Sit on-site at the customer’s headquarters, working day-to-day with its business stakeholders, program team, and technical leadership. You’ll be the main point where account strategy and technical delivery come together.
• Translate in both directions: Turn business priorities into a delivery plan you can actually build, and turn platform capability into outcomes that work for the people using them. A lot of the value here is judgment and translation, not just code.
• Lead technical discovery: Run architecture discussions, whiteboarding, and discovery needed to map a complex data ecosystem across PLM, drawings, specifications, and parts data spanning several business units.
• Resolve blockers at the desk: Work through a rigid enterprise environment with high interpersonal instincts. Comfortable walking over to a stakeholder’s desk to unpack an integration roadblock and get people to agreement.

Build Governed Agentic Workflows & Search Solutions

• Ship production artifacts: Write clean, production‑grade code for complex components like Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, stateful sub‑agents, and deterministic agent skills on our agent orchestration platform.
• Model‑agnostic design: Build workflows that use the right frontier LLM for the job (Claude, Gemini, GPT, or specialized open‑source models), tuned for cost, context limits, and latency.
• Optimize search at scale: Manage high‑scale indexing and search pipelines for a user population in the tens of thousands. Include search‑engine performance work, document chunking, and real‑time relevancy tuning across a range of data silos, including PLM‑sourced technical content (e.g., PTC Windchill).
• Build in strong guardrails: Design clear process guardrails and required Human‑in‑the‑Loop (HITL) checkpoints, including SME validation, role‑based access, and a capability maturity lifecycle, so autonomous agents working in low‑margin‑for‑error settings stay safe, predictable, and auditable.

Bridge Delivery and R&D, and Scale the Product

• Bridge PS and R&D: Sit between Professional Services delivery and core R&D. Carry escalation authority and roadmap visibility, and route what you find in the field into structured product feedback.
• Accelerate the handover: Bring product depth that helps the customer’s embedded team take over more of the work over time. Gradually hand it off so their team can run it without you.
• Champion safety & reliability: Keep a high bar for data privacy, ensuring native enterprise document‑level permissions hold up end‑to‑end through the retrieval and AI execution loop.

You May Be a Good Fit If You Have

• Agentic platform depth: Hands‑on experience with agentic platforms and agent orchestration matters most for this role. If you’ve done this kind of work before, you’ll get up to speed faster. If not, we want to see you ramped quickly on complex proprietary platforms in the past.
• A proven track record (8+ years): Time in a highly technical, customer‑facing role such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, or client‑facing Software Engineer. Former technical founders are also highly encouraged.
• Account leadership: Run a strategic account relationship, not just close out tickets. Able to discuss governance risk with a Director and debug a retrieval pipeline with a developer.
• Production programming: Solid, production‑grade proficiency in Python and C#, with working TypeScript for front‑end integration, and clean, maintainable code.
• Production AI experience: Shipped AI‑powered systems in the real world, including prompt engineering, agent development, evaluation frameworks, and deployment at scale.
• Search & retrieval expertise: Deep, practical experience with enterprise search engines, relevancy tuning, and vector databases (e.g., Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Pinecone).
• Production agentic orchestration: Hands‑on experience building stateful multi‑agent workflows, managing context windows, and wiring up structured tool‑calling and API integrations with modern frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, LlamaIndex).
• Manufacturing domain depth & PLM: Experience in manufacturing settings, indexing large structured and unstructured enterprise document lifecycles. Direct experience with PTC Windchill is an advantage.
• High‑context communication: Comfortable navigating between deep technical debugging and higher‑level, risk‑focused conversations.

How We Work With AI

We’re an AI company, and AI fluency is part of how we work day‑to‑day, not a side skill. You’ll use frontier models regularly to move faster and do better work, and we’d like you to have a point of view on where AI helps and where it gets in the way. The interview includes a short, practical AI exercise so we can see how you think about designing and using it.

Why Join Us

• Real, measurable impact: Work on a program where our agentic platform already outperforms in‑house tools, on data that general‑purpose AI cannot reach.
• Real ownership: Own the technical relationship with a global manufacturing leader and have the room to decide how the work gets done, with the platform behind you.
• A direct line to the platform: Work closely with core Product and R&D teams, and learnings in the field feed into what we build next.
• Hard, interesting work: Productionized agentic architectures, model‑agnostic systems, and governed enterprise AI at global scale.

Benefits

Full benefits package: medical, dental, and vision coverage, a 401(k) plan, a generous time‑off policy, and an annual learning and wellness stipend.

Working Conditions

Location: On-site at the customer’s headquarters in the U.S. Midwest (Columbus, Indiana area). Typically, four days on-site and one day remote. Local residence or relocation is required.

We are currently unable to consider candidates who require, or will require in the future, sponsorship for work authorization. Applicants must be authorized to work in the US on a permanent and ongoing basis without the need for current or future employer‑sponsored work authorization.