Remote Forward‑Deployed AI Engineer: Data & Automation Lead

Topsail; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote‑first culture

Equity

Frontier AI budget and ample tokens

Job summary

Topsail, a growing, remote‑first AI services company, is hiring a Generalist Forward‑Deployed Engineer to own client end‑to‑end engagements. You will map business processes, build the data foundation, and deploy agents on top of it, operating across industries with the founders.

Remote work with regular travel to client sites, reporting to the founders. You will run multiple engagements concurrently, designing ontology, enterprise data flows, and model‑agnostic agent platforms, ensuring

Qualifications

• Shipped a production system that real users depend on.
• Designed schemas for a real business domain and performed entity resolution.
• Built agents, retrieval systems, and deployment strategies from the ground up.
• Familiar with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or similar tools daily.
• Comfortable speaking with a CEO and frontline staff in the same meeting.

Responsibilities

• Run discovery with executives and frontline staff to turn vague mandates into a ranked roadmap with clear baselines.
• Model the business and install the ontology (entities, relationships, rules) from disparate sources.
• Design and ship agents, retrieval systems, and automations on the foundation, while staying model-agnostic.
• Own evals and observability; ensure measurement against baselines and user adoption.
• Train client teams to use what you built and empower them to continue building without you.

Skills

Production systems

Data modeling

Agent development

Retrieval systems

Model deployment

Cross‑functional collaboration

Tools

Claude Code

Codex

Cursor

Job description

Topsail, a growing, remote‑first AI services company, is hiring a Generalist Forward‑Deployed Engineer to own client end‑to‑end engagements. You will map business processes, build the data foundation, and deploy agents on top of it, operating across industries with the founders.

Remote work with regular travel to client sites, reporting to the founders. You will run multiple engagements concurrently, designing ontology, enterprise data flows, and model‑agnostic agent platforms, ensuring