Forward Deployed Engineer, Research

Hyphen Connect; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Hyphen Connect is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to embed with customer teams, architect, code, and deploy complex AI agent systems into production. You will write high-volume production code and solve architecture challenges in real time.

In this role you will communicate with elite researchers, bridge customer needs with our platform roadmap, and help unblock deployment pipelines across high-throughput workflows in enterprise environments.

Qualifications

• Experience building complex agentic systems, tool-use frameworks, autonomous workflows, or high-density retrieval/reasoning engines.

Responsibilities

• Code, build, and deploy production-ready AI agent architectures tailored to customer environments.
• Lead deep technical discussions, reviews, and architecture sessions with client engineers and ML researchers.

Skills

Agent architecture

FDE track record

Software fundamentals

Engineering credibility

Job description

Location: San Francisco (In-Person) OR New York (In-Person, with an initial 3–6 month rotation in SF)

About the Role

We are looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) who builds like a core systems engineer and communicates like a peer to elite researchers. You will embed directly with technical teams at customer organizations—working shoulder-to-shoulder with their machine learning engineers, researchers, and infrastructure leads—to architect, code, and deploy complex AI agent systems into production.

This is not a traditional solutions engineering or technical account management role. You will write high-volume, production-grade code, solve non-trivial architecture challenges in real time, and push the limits of what automated agent workflows can accomplish in enterprise environments.

What You'll Do

• Code & Ship Systems: Design, build, and deploy production-ready AI agent architectures tailored to high-complexity customer environments (think Decagon, Sierra, Harvey, or Glean-style workflows).
• Engage Technical Peers: Lead deep technical discussions, code reviews, and architecture reviews directly with client engineers and ML researchers, establishing immediate credibility.
• Bridge Product & Customer: Extract core engineering patterns from client deployments to inform and directly contribute to our core platform and product roadmap.
• Unblock Deployment Pipelines: Diagnose performance bottlenecks, hallucination vectors, state-management failures, and latency issues across high-throughput agent pipelines.

What We're Looking For

• Agent Architecture Experience: Proven track record building complex agentic systems, tool-use frameworks, autonomous workflows, or high-density retrieval/reasoning engines.
• Hands-on Technical FDE Track Record: Prior experience in a forward-deployed engineering role where you explicitly wrote production code, or an engineering role with a heavy customer-facing edge.
• Stack-Agnostic Software Fundamentals: Strong foundation in computer science, system design, data structures, and production backend code—regardless of specific language or framework.
• Engineering Credibility: Ability to go white-board-to-white-board on LLM internals, evaluation frameworks, memory management, and edge cases with top-tier AI researchers and engineers.

Location & Mobility

• San Francisco: In-person full-time OR
• New York: In-person full-time, with an initial 3 to 6-month immersion/rotation in San Francisco before settling in NYC.