Founding Leader, Forward-Deployed AI Engineering

Afresh Technologies; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health plans

Parental leave

Equity packages

401k matching

Flexible vacation

Professional development

Work from home stipend

Job summary

Afresh Technologies is seeking a player-coach Architect to build and lead the forward deployed engineering team embedded with large grocery customers. You’ll own the technical relationship with the customers’ engineering leaders, review architectures, and steer execution across multiple accounts while staying hands-on when needed.

This role sits in an existing AI engineering group but will be built from the ground up, with accountability for hiring, standards, and the platform’s evolution.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering, solutions architecture, consulting or a technical customer-facing role.
• 2+ years managing engineers in services or forward deployed settings.
• Own architecture across accounts and lead multi-account deployments.
• Willingness to travel 25–40% to customer sites.
• Grocery, retail or supply chain data experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead the forward deployed engineering team and set technical standards.
• Review architectures, unblock the team, and contribute code when needed.
• Manage concurrent engagements and decide what to build and in what order.
• Hire, develop, and retain engineers; define reference architectures.
• Partner with our AI engineering group and interface with enterprise data leadership.

Skills

Software engineering

Solutions architecture

Customer-facing

Consulting

Tools

Databricks

BigQuery

Snowflake

Job description

Afresh Technologies is seeking a player-coach Architect to build and lead the forward deployed engineering team embedded with large grocery customers. You’ll own the technical relationship with the customers’ engineering leaders, review architectures, and steer execution across multiple accounts while staying hands-on when needed.

This role sits in an existing AI engineering group but will be built from the ground up, with accountability for hiring, standards, and the platform’s evolution.