Forward Deployed Engineer - Investment Systems

KKR; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary bonus

Job summary

KKR is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer in New York to embed with investment teams and build production AI systems that streamline workflows. You will own end‑to‑end delivery from architecture to deployment, collaborating with product, data, security, and platform teams.

The role emphasizes transforming ambiguous business challenges into concrete technical solutions, shipping reusable platform components, and driving adoption across business units within a regulated enterprise environment.

Qualifications

• Hands-on software engineering for production AI systems.
• Proficiency in Python or TypeScript with APIs and cloud experience.
• Experience building AI-enabled applications and evaluating behavior.
• Data pipelines, databases, and retrieval systems handling unstructured content.
• Experience with enterprise data and cross-team collaboration.
• Ability to work with senior business stakeholders and translate needs into technical solutions.

Responsibilities

• Observe business workflows across teams to understand information flows and bottlenecks.
• Identify opportunities where AI reduces manual tasks and improves decision quality.
• Define architectures, delivery plans, and production-grade AI applications.
• Build and ship AI agents, integrations, and workflow automations.
• Design data pipelines and interfaces to enable AI usability.
• Create reusable skills, tools, and framework components across teams.
• Establish metrics for accuracy, reliability, adoption and impact.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

LLM applications

Data pipelines

APIs

Cloud platforms

Distributed systems

Security and privacy

Observability

Collaboration with stakeholders

Job description

Company Overview

KKR is a leading global investment firm that offers alternative asset management as well as capital markets and insurance solutions. KKR aims to generate attractive investment returns by following a patient and disciplined investment approach, employing world‑class people, and supporting growth in its portfolio companies and communities. KKR sponsors investment funds that invest in private equity, credit and real assets and has strategic partners that manage hedge funds. KKR’s insurance subsidiaries offer retirement, life and reinsurance products under the management of Global Atlantic Financial Group. References to KKR’s investments may include the activities of its sponsored funds and insurance subsidiaries.

Position Summary

KKR is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to help bring AI into the daily work of teams across the firm. This is a hands‑on engineering role with a builder's mindset: you are an embedded extension of the engineering team that works directly with investment teams to understand how their work gets done, then design, build, and ship production AI systems that improve it.

Your customers are internal: colleagues across private equity, credit, infrastructure, real estate, insurance and capital markets. You will sit with these teams and observe their workflows firsthand. You will identify where fragmented data, repetitive tasks, and manual handoffs slow high‑value work, and translate ambiguous business challenges into well‑defined technical problems. You will then own the solution end to end, from architecture, code, data integration, to evaluation, deployment, and adoption, in close partnership with your direct engineering teammates, product, AI, data, security, and platform colleagues.

The best solutions you build will not stay one‑off. You will convert successful implementations into reusable skills, tools, agents, and workflow components that scale across teams and strengthen the firm’s broader AI platform. If you are an engineer who wants your code to shape how a leading global investment firm works, this role offers rare scope and impact.

Responsibilities

• Engage teams across KKR’s businesses to observe how work is delivered, going beyond documented requirements to understand information flows, decision points, and day‑to‑day realities.
• Identify high‑value opportunities where AI can remove bottlenecks, connect fragmented data, eliminate repetitive work, or improve the speed and quality of decisions.
• Translate loosely defined business challenges into clear technical problem statements, solution architectures, and delivery plans.
• Design, build, and ship production‑grade AI applications, agents, integrations, and workflow automations using modern languages such as Python or TypeScript.
• Connect structured and unstructured data across enterprise systems and make it reliably usable by AI‑enabled applications through pipelines, retrieval systems, and well‑designed interfaces.
• Create, test, and maintain reusable AI skills, tools, prompts, connectors, evaluation frameworks, and workflow components that can be shared across teams and business units.
• Establish rigorous evaluations and success metrics that measure accuracy, reliability, adoption, time saved, decision quality, risk reduction, and business impact.
• Move rapidly from discovery to prototype to production while upholding high standards for security, data protection, privacy, compliance, reliability, and maintainability.
• Decompose organic, often undocumented workflows into modular capabilities — data, decisions, actions, and controls — and determine where AI, deterministic software, or human judgment is the right tool.
• Drive adoption through documentation, training, direct user feedback, and close, ongoing partnership with the teams you serve.
• Convert successful high‑touch implementations into repeatable engineering patterns and scalable platform capabilities, feeding insights into the firm’s broader AI roadmap.
• Challenge conventional practices constructively, helping teams reimagine workflows rather than simply automating existing steps.

How You’ll Work With The Business And Technology Teams

Forward Deployed Engineers and technology teams own the engineering side of AI enablement for business partners: architecture, integration, data pipelines, security implementation, and production operations. Paired with a business‑embedded AI Solutions counterpart, you will be in the room together from the first discovery conversation, and you will stay engaged together through deployment testing with users, measuring results, and iterating. Your job is to make sure what gets built solves the right problem, fits how people actually work, meets the firm's control requirements, and gets used. Along the way, you will also work with product owners, data teams, information security, and corporate functions such as legal and compliance, tailoring your communication to each audience.

Qualifications

• A strong software engineering foundation, with hands‑on experience designing, building, and operating production systems — at least or equivalent demonstrated capability.
• Proficiency in Python, TypeScript, or comparable modern programming languages, with experience across APIs, cloud platforms, distributed systems, and enterprise integrations.
• Practical experience building applications with large language models — including agents, retrieval‑augmented generation, tool use, and orchestration — and evaluating their behavior.
• Facility with data: pipelines, databases, retrieval systems, and unstructured content, and the judgment to make imperfect enterprise data usable.
• Genuine commercial curiosity and a strong desire to learn KKR’s businesses — how investments are evaluated, how decisions are made, and which outcomes matter.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity: the ability to take a vague problem, ask good questions, uncover needs users may not initially articulate, and converge on a concrete solution.
• The range to move fluidly between writing code, discussing architecture, observing workflows, and engaging senior business stakeholders.
• Act as a conductor across a diverse set of stakeholders — including business teams, business‑aligned product and engineering, AI platform product and engineering, and data operations — to align priorities, resolve dependencies, and drive projects forward to successful delivery.
• A commitment to engineering quality — testing, observability, security, privacy, and responsible AI practices — even when moving quickly.
• Clear communication and a collaborative, low‑ego working style, with the ability to give and receive direct feedback.
• Experience deploying AI or data‑intensive systems in large enterprises or regulated environments.
• Exposure to private markets, financial services, or other domains with complex, judgment‑heavy workflows.
• Experience partnering directly with senior business stakeholders to shape and deliver technical solutions.
• A track record of turning bespoke solutions into reusable platforms, frameworks, or internal products.
• Experience with evaluation frameworks, observability tooling, or governance practices for LLM applications.

What Success Looks Like

• AI solutions you built are running in production and used every day by the teams they were designed for.
• Workflows you touched are measurably better — faster cycle times, higher‑quality decisions, less manual effort, or lower operational risk.
• Capabilities you created — skills, tools, agents, connectors, and evaluation frameworks — are reused by other teams and business units.
• Business partners trust you as someone who understands their work and seek you out with their hardest problems.
• The systems you ship are secure, reliable, well‑evaluated, and maintainable long after launch.
• Lessons from your deployments visibly shape the firm’s broader AI platform and roadmap.

Salary and Benefits

This is the expected annual base salary range for this New York‑based position. Actual salaries may vary based on factors, such as skill, experience, and qualification for the role. Employees may be eligible for a discretionary bonus, based on factors such as individual and team performance.

Base Salary Range

$180,000—$200,000 USD

KKR is an equal opportunity employer. Individuals seeking employment are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, or any other category protected by applicable law.

KKR will provide reasonable accommodations as required by applicable federal, state, and/or local laws. Individuals seeking an accommodation for the application or interview process should email [e-mail]. Emails sent for unrelated issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.

If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran, you may request a reasonable accommodation if you are unable or limited in your ability to use or access https://www.kkr.com/careers because of your disability. You can request reasonable accommodations by sending an email to [e-mail]. Only emails left for this purpose will be returned.

Massachusetts Applicants:

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability. This notice applies only to applicants and employees who work or will work in Massachusetts, in accordance with applicable state law.