Forward Deployed Engineer – Industrial AI
Role Description
SF Bay Area, California | Fully On-site | Approximately 25% Domestic Travel
We are seeking a technical Forward Deployed Engineer to bring advanced AI systems into production environments for large industrial enterprise customers.
The Opportunity -------------------
This is a hands-on software engineering role combining customer-facing deployment work with direct ownership of integrations, data flows, and AI-enabled workflows.
Key Responsibilities ------------------------
- Embed with enterprise customers to deploy AI-powered systems into live operational environments.
- Build and maintain integrations using APIs, webhooks, ETL processes, and enterprise data systems.
- Integrate with ERP, CMMS, ticketing, knowledge-management, and enterprise service platforms.
- Work with systems such as SAP, ServiceNow, and related enterprise platforms where required by the customer environment.
- Build agentic AI and/or retrieval-augmented generation capabilities as part of customer solutions.
- Translate ambiguous operational requirements into shipped technical solutions.
- Partner directly with customer engineering and operational teams.
Required Qualifications ---------------------------
- Approximately 1 to 5 years of hands-on software engineering, implementation engineering, solutions engineering, or forward-deployed engineering experience.
- Demonstrated ability to personally write and ship production code.
- Experience integrating software with complex customer systems.
- Hands-on experience with modern AI applications, agentic systems, and/or RAG solutions.
- Strong customer-facing communication skills combined with technical depth.
- Willingness to travel domestically approximately 25% of the time.
Candidate Profile ---------------------
This opportunity is best suited to engineers who enjoy operating between product development and customer deployment. Pure pre-sales, non-coding consulting, or platform-configuration-only backgrounds are not aligned with the role.
Work Arrangement --------------------
Fully in person in the San Francisco Bay Area, with domestic customer travel as required.
Work Authorization ----------------------
Candidates must be able to work in the United States. Certain sponsorship and visa-transfer scenarios may be considered for candidates already located in the United States.
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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