Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Atomic Industries; Kentucky; On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Atomic Industries in the United States seeks an AI engineer who will own building industry-specific GPTs and embed AI-native functionality into our system of record.

You’ll ship a working domain agent in 30 days, build the eval harness, fine-tune models, and observe customer workflows. This hands-on role requires writing the playbook that future portfolio companies inherit and delivering real value for customers.

Qualifications

• Shipped AI products used by customers in production environments.
• Strong opinion on model selection, fine-tuning, and eval metrics.
• Willing to travel to customer sites and understand business needs.

Responsibilities

• Ship a domain-specific agent into a live customer environment within 30 days.
• Build the eval infrastructure to measure automation of workflows.
• Fine-tune, distill, or route across frontier and open models for each vertical.
• Sit with customers, observe workflows, and iterate solutions accordingly.
• Write the AI engineering playbook that future portfolio companies inherit.

Skills

AI engineering

Production deployment

Customer deployment

Open models

Frontier stack

Tools

Claude

GPT-4

Gemini

OpenAI models

Job description

We're a stealth holding company acquiring and operating software businesses in overlooked, mission-critical industries - the systems that run the physical economy but have been ignored by Silicon Valley. We're rebuilding them as AI-native from the inside out.

We're small, well-capitalized, and moving fast. This is not a research lab. This is a build shop with real customers, real revenue, and real P&Ls.

The Role

You will be the AI engineer. You'll own:

1. Building the industry-specific GPT: the reasoning layer that encodes the domain expertise of each vertical we operate in.

2. Embedding AI-native functionality directly into our AI-native system of record: not bolt-on chatbots. Core workflow replacement. Agents that do the job.

3. Moving legacy systems of record datasets into new ai-native ones: Core workflow replacement. Agents that do the job.

4. Making it repeatable: Every new company we bring into the portfolio should benefit from the playbook, model stack, eval harness, and infra you build.

5. Managing AI talent across our operating companies: you'll be a player-coach for the AI engineers embedded at each sub.

Split: 90% building. 10% managing. If that ratio scares you, this isn't your role. If it excites you, keep reading.

What You’ll Do

• Ship a working domain-specific agent into a live customer environment in your first 30 days

• Build the eval infrastructure that lets us measure whether these agents are actually replacing human workflows (not vibes)

• Fine-tune, distill, or route across frontier + open models depending on the economics of each vertical

• Sit with customers. Watch them work. Instrument their workflows. Rebuild them.

• Write the AI engineering playbook that every future portfolio company inherits on day one

Who You Are

• You are a builder first. You've shipped things people actually use. Alone or as the clear technical lead.

• You are a forward-deployed engineer. You'll fly to a customer site, sit in their office, and understand the business before you write a line of code.

• You've been called a 10x engineer and it wasn't in a self-review.

• You have strong opinions about when to fine-tune vs. prompt vs. RAG vs. agent vs harness and you can defend them with numbers.

• You've built with the current frontier stack (Claude, GPT, Gemini, open models) in production, not just in a Jupyter notebook.

• You are allergic to slide decks and comfortable with ambiguity, small teams, and unglamorous industries.

What This Role Is Not

• A research role. We ship.

• A management role. You build.

• A "Head of AI" title for LinkedIn. You will be in the codebase daily.

• A place for people who need process, roadmaps handed to them, or a 20-person team to feel productive.

We are focused on building a diverse and inclusive workforce. If you’re excited about this role, but do not meet 100% of the qualifications listed above, we encourage you to apply.

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Atomic is an Equal Opportunity Employer and considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, orientation, national origin, age, disability, genetics or any other basis forbidden under federal, state, or local law.

Please review ourCCPA policieshere.