Forward Deployed Engineer – Data Engineering & GenAI

Asterism IT Solutions; Washington (District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Asterism IT Solutions in the Washington, DC area seeks a Forward Deployed Engineer with deep software and data engineering background, plus GenAI experience. You will work directly with customers to understand requirements, design architectures, and deploy scalable solutions across cloud, data, and AI systems.

You will own end-to-end delivery, including API design, data pipelines, and integration with enterprise data.

Qualifications

• 14+ years of professional IT/software engineering experience.
• Strong hands-on software engineering experience.
• Strong data engineering fundamentals: ETL/ELT, data modeling, schema mapping, data pipelines.
• Strong Python development skills.
• Experience designing and integrating REST APIs and backend services.
• Hands-on experience building applications using LLMs/Generative AI.
• Experience with AI agents, RAG systems, tool/function calling, or similar.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers to understand objectives, workflows, and environments.
• Translate ambiguous requirements into architectures and working solutions.
• Rapidly prototype, build, test, deploy, and iterate on customer-facing solutions.
• Own technical delivery from discovery through production adoption.
• Design and develop APIs and backend services.
• Integrate applications with databases, APIs, cloud services, AI models, and customer systems.
• Build ETL/ELT pipelines for ingestion, transformation, and delivery.
• Develop GenAI-powered applications that automate complex customer workflows.
• Build LLM-based agents and agentic workflows across enterprise data and tools.
• Implement tool/function calling, outputs, and workflow orchestration.

Skills

Software engineering

Data engineering

Python

REST APIs

GenAI/LLMs

Customer-facing delivery

Tools

AWS/GCP/Azure

Job description

Job Title: Forward Deployed Engineer – Data Engineering & GenAI

Location: Washington, DC Metro Area – Hybrid
Local Candidates Only
Duration: 6 Months
Experience: 14+ Years
Work Authorization: US Citizens Only
Interview: Final round – Face-to-Face
Tax Terms: W2 / C2C

Job Description

We are seeking an experienced Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) with strong software engineering, data engineering, Generative AI, and customer-facing experience.

This is not a traditional implementation, solutions consulting, or data engineering role. The ideal candidate will work directly with customers to understand complex and ambiguous operational problems, translate requirements into technical solutions, and personally build and deploy those solutions.

The role sits at the intersection of software engineering, data, APIs, cloud, customers, and Generative AI.

Must-Have Requirements

• 14+ years of professional IT/software engineering experience.
• Strong hands-on software engineering experience.
• Strong data engineering fundamentals, including ETL/ELT, data modeling, schema mapping, and data pipelines.
• Strong Python development skills.
• Experience designing and integrating REST APIs and backend services.
• Hands-on experience building applications using LLMs / Generative AI.
• Experience with one or more of:
  • AI Agents
  • RAG systems
  • Tool/function calling
  • LLM-powered applications
  • AI workflow automation
• Ability to take ambiguous customer requirements and independently turn them into working technical solutions.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills across applications, APIs, infrastructure, and data.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Demonstrated experience working directly with customers and senior stakeholders.
• Ability to work effectively in fast-moving environments with incomplete requirements.
• Must be able to work hybrid in the Washington, DC Metro Area 2–3 days per week and support office/customer-site presence.
• US Citizens Only.

Strongly Preferred

• Previous experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect, Technical Consultant, or customer-facing Software/Data Engineer.
• Federal government, defense, intelligence, national security, or other mission-critical environment experience.
• AWS, Azure, or GCP experience.
• Snowflake, Databricks, Spark, Kafka, Airflow, dbt, or equivalent modern data technologies.
• Vector databases, embeddings, retrieval systems, and modern LLM frameworks.
• Experience deploying AI applications into production.
• Human-in-the-loop workflows and AI evaluation systems.
• Enterprise security, authentication, authorization, and data-governance experience.
• Experience developing reusable technical approaches and influencing engineering/product strategy.

Key Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers to understand business objectives, workflows, technical environments, and pain points.
• Translate ambiguous customer requirements into technical architectures and working solutions.
• Rapidly prototype, build, test, deploy, and iterate on customer-facing solutions.
• Own technical delivery from discovery through implementation and production adoption.
• Design and develop APIs and backend services.
• Integrate applications with databases, APIs, cloud services, AI models, and customer systems.
• Build ETL/ELT pipelines for ingestion, transformation, and delivery.
• Execute bulk data processing using formats such as Parquet, CSV, and JSON.
• Build and maintain REST/API integrations.
• Develop GenAI-powered applications that automate complex customer workflows.
• Build LLM-based agents and agentic workflows across enterprise data, APIs, and tools.
• Develop RAG pipelines connecting LLMs with structured and unstructured enterprise data.
• Implement tool/function calling, structured outputs, workflow orchestration, and multi-step AI systems.
• Build evaluation frameworks and feedback loops to improve AI application quality.
• Apply production engineering practices including testing, version control, CI/CD, monitoring, security, and documentation.

Ideal Candidate

The ideal candidate combines:

Software Engineering + Data Engineering + Python + GenAI/LLMs + APIs + Customer-Facing Delivery

Candidates should be able to move comfortably between a customer conversation, architecture whiteboard, IDE, data pipeline, and production deployment.

Only candidates who meet the core technical requirements and are local to the Washington, DC Metro Area should apply.