Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Clutch; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Clutch builds AI agents that work on behalf of credit unions. Emma, our collections agent, is live at five credit unions and handled 60,000+ member conversations in her first twelve weeks at one of them.

Behind her is a growing portfolio: origination, fraud step-up, member (re)engagement and activation agents, all built on the same Agents Platform (TypeScript, NestJS, our own agent SDK, MCP, Temporal, promptfoo). As a FDE you are one of the two engineers on an agent.

Qualifications

• Senior engineer with hands-on production code in a monorepo.
• Experience building integrations to core banking and loan systems.
• Ability to lead customer-facing technical work and own outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Within 1 month, ship a production change to a live agent and explain the end-to-end flow.
• Learn one agent deeply: prompts, tool contracts, orchestration, and go-live process.
• Join at least one credit union implementation as second engineer with live testing.
• Map bottlenecks in current implementation and propose defaults or tools to reduce trips.
• Within 3 months, own end-to-end technical side of one implementation.
• Run eval and tuning loop for your agent with limited external review.
• Complete two on-site visits and translate observations into product decisions.
• Contribute at least one reusable capability back to the Agents Platform.

Job description

About the Role

Clutch builds AI agents that work on behalf of credit unions. Emma, our collections agent, is live at five credit unions and handled 60,000+ member conversations in her first twelve weeks at one of them. Behind her is a growing portfolio: origination, fraud step-up, member (re)engagement and activation agents, all built on the same Agents Platform (TypeScript, NestJS, our own agent SDK, MCP, Temporal, promptfoo).

As a FDE you are one of the two engineers on an agent. You take it from \"sold\" to \"live and performing\" at a specific credit union: you sit in the discovery sessions, you build the integrations to their core banking and loan systems, you author and tune the agent's behavior, you run the live tests with their staff, and you stay with it through go-live and the first weeks of production. When something needs a person in the room, you are the one who flies.

This is a senior engineering role, not a solutions or support role. You write production code in our monorepo every week: integrations, modules, and the agents themselves (prompts, tools, evals), together with the other engineers on the pod. The difference from a traditional engineer is that you are on site more often, you make judgment calls in front of the customer, and you own the outcome. What you learn in the field flows straight back into the product: defaults, playbooks, and the platform capabilities the next agent will need.

You build; our AI Operations Managers deliver. The pod (pod lead plus engineers) designs and builds each agent in a high-touch way with the first customers. Once the agent is defined and live, AI Ops coordinates the implementations, configuration and ongoing success at the next credit unions. You hand them something that works and a playbook to run it.

• This role requires roughly 20% of travel on average, with one- to two-week stretches around kickoffs and go-lives. Based in the US, able to travel on short notice

About the Team

You’ll join the Agents team, a small, senior group operating as a startup inside Clutch: seven engineers, a dedicated AI product group, and AI sales specialists, working directly with some of the largest credit unions in the country. Every agent is staffed by a pair of engineers, one leaning toward the conversation and LLM side, one toward software and integrations, with a pod lead who owns the product day to day. There is no layer between you and the customer, and no layer between you and the platform team.

The operating style is direct, written, and evidence-driven: BLUF updates, evals over opinions, business outcomes over ticket counts. The team is spread across Brazil, Argentina and the US and works async by default. Being on site is a tool we use at specific moments (kickoff, live testing, go-live), not a permanent posting.

What You’ll Do

Within 1 months, you will:

• Ship your first production change to a live agent through the team's review process, and be able to explain how a member's call flows through the Agents Platform end to end




• Learn one agent deeply: system prompt, tool contracts, orchestration triggers, compliance gates, and the implementation process from kickoff to go-live




• Join at least one credit union implementation as the second engineer, including a live testing session with their staff




• Map where the current implementation process loses time and where a default or a tool would have removed a round trip

Within 3 months, you will:

• Own the technical side of one credit union implementation end to end: core and LOS integration, agent configuration, testing, go-live, and the first weeks of production




• Run the eval and tuning loop for your agent (golden transcripts, rubric judges, regression suite) and be trusted to change its behavior without a second engineer checking your work




• Have completed at least two on-site visits and turned what you heard there into product decisions with your pod lead and PM




• Contribute at least one reusable capability back to the Agents Platform that the next implementation will not have to rebuild