Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

afresh; United States; Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Mental-health support

Retirement matching

Equity

Home-office and coworking support

Professional-development funding

Monthly wellness stipend

Telecommunications stipend

Flexible paid time off

Job summary

afresh is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to blend customer-facing delivery with platform engineering. You will partner with enterprise grocery teams to integrate data, build production-grade AI systems, and distill deployment learnings into reusable infrastructure and tools.

You will design scalable data pipelines, connect cloud data platforms, and develop LLM/agent solutions with evaluation and observability, delivering repeatable, high-quality implementations across multiple

Qualifications

• 3+ years of production software and data systems experience.
• Able to turn ambiguous problems into architectures.
• Hands-on experience with real LLM/agent apps including retrieval-augmented generation.
• Strong data engineering with production pipelines and enterprise data modeling.
• Comfort switching between customer-facing work and platform development.
• Ability to lead technical sessions and build trust through delivery.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with customer teams to scope, design, and productionize solutions.
• Build data pipelines and transform enterprise data into reliable products.
• Design and deploy production-grade LLM and agent systems with tooling and QA.
• Enhance platform capabilities like knowledge graphs, retrieval, and serving layers.
• Develop evaluation, tracing, and observability to measure quality and cost.
• Create reusable interfaces and components, feeding learnings back to the platform.

Skills

Production software

Data engineering

LLM/Agent apps

Cloud data platforms

Leadership in sessions

System design

Tools

Databricks

BigQuery

Snowflake

Job description

Role overview

The Senior Forward Deployed Engineer combines customer-facing delivery with platform engineering. You will work directly with enterprise grocery organizations to integrate complex data, build production-grade AI systems, and then turn lessons from those deployments into reusable infrastructure, evaluation tools, and frameworks that accelerate future implementations.

Responsibilities

• Work with customer technical teams to define scope, design architecture, identify data sources, and establish a path to production.
• Integrate with cloud and data platforms, build reliable pipelines, and transform messy enterprise data into trustworthy data products.
• Design and deploy production-ready LLM and agent systems, including retrieval, tool use, data-quality workflows, and analytics agents.
• Strengthen shared platform capabilities such as knowledge graphs, ontologies, retrieval and grounding layers, agent frameworks, and serving infrastructure.
• Build evaluation, tracing, and observability tools to measure accuracy, hallucination rates, latency, cost, and system quality.
• Create clean interfaces and reusable components instead of one-off customer implementations, while feeding field learnings back into the platform.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of experience building production software and data systems with strong engineering practices.
• Ability to turn ambiguous problems and complex data environments into practical architectures and working systems.
• Hands-on experience building real LLM or agent applications, including retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, and quality evaluation.
• Strong data-engineering experience with production pipelines, enterprise data modeling, and modern cloud data platforms such as Databricks, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar.
• Comfort switching between customer-facing collaboration and focused platform development.
• Ability to lead technical working sessions, explain design decisions, and build trust through delivery.

Benefits and work setup

• Remote work is available in specified U.S. states, with some customer work conducted remotely or on site.
• Listed benefits for eligible full-time U.S. employees include medical, dental, and vision coverage, mental-health support, retirement matching, equity, home-office and coworking support, professional-development funding, monthly wellness and telecommunications stipends, and flexible paid time off.