Role Description
Forward Deployed AI Engineer — Judgment Labs ------------------------------------------------
Location: San Francisco, CA (Onsite)
Compensation: $200,000–$400,000
Experience Level: 3–7 years
Employment Type: Full-Time
About Judgment Labs
Judgment Labs builds infrastructure for Agent Behavior Monitoring (ABM), helping organizations evaluate and monitor AI agent performance in production environments. Their platform identifies behavioral anomalies such as instruction drift, retrieval degradation, and reliability failures across complex workflows. The company has raised more than $30M from investors including Lightspeed, SV Angel, Valor Equity Partners, and others.
About the Role
This is a highly technical, customer-facing engineering role focused on deploying AI systems into live production environments. You will embed directly into customer codebases, diagnose failures, and ensure successful AI system deployment at scale — owning engagements end to end with high autonomy and minimal hand-holding.
What You'll Own
- Deploy and integrate AI systems into customer production environments
- Work directly within customer codebases to implement monitoring and evaluation
- Translate ambiguous customer needs into concrete technical solutions
- Diagnose and resolve issues in live AI workflows
- Own deployments end to end across multiple concurrent engagements
Requirements
- 3–7 years experience in technical, customer-facing, or deployment roles
- Experience with forward deployed engineering or solutions architecture
- Experience deploying AI or LLM systems into production
- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills
- Ability to operate independently with high ownership
Nice to Have
- Experience from infrastructure or observability environments
- Background at fast-moving AI startups
This Role Is NOT For
- Primarily sales engineering profiles without hands-on technical work
- Candidates with less than 3 years experience (without an exceptional background)
- Stagnant senior-level progression without demonstrated growth
Logistics
- Role is fully onsite in San Francisco — please only apply if you can commit to this
Shortlisted candidates will be contacted by David Joseph & Co., the recruiting partner managing this search on behalf of Judgment Labs.
About Forward Deployed Engineering
Forward Deployed Engineers are embedded directly with customers to build custom solutions, integrate products into existing infrastructure, and bridge the gap between product engineering and customer success. The role combines deep technical skills with the ability to operate in client environments and translate business requirements into working software.
Originally pioneered by Palantir, the FDE model has spread across AI, enterprise SaaS, and cloud infrastructure companies. FDEs write production code, architect integrations, train customer teams, and feed product insights back to the core engineering organization. At companies like OpenAI, Salesforce, and Databricks, FDE teams are treated as elite engineering units that can ship custom solutions in days rather than quarters.
Typical FDE stack: Python, TypeScript, SQL, REST/GraphQL APIs, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), and increasingly LLM APIs and AI orchestration frameworks. Strong communication and the ability to context-switch between technical and business conversations are as important as coding ability.
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