Role Description
Forward Deployed Engineer (Agentic AI Systems) Chatsworth, CA (Onsite) Build production AI agents—not chatbots.
Our client is a stealth-stage AI startup building enterprise-grade autonomous agent platforms that automate complex, knowledge-intensive business processes. Their systems reason, plan, integrate with enterprise software, maintain long-term memory, and execute real work in production.
They're hiring a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to work directly with enterprise customers, deploying agentic AI systems into mission-critical workflows.
If you've already shipped production AI agents and love solving difficult engineering problems alongside customers, we'd love to speak with you.
What You'll Do* Lead enterprise deployments from discovery through production * Design and build agentic AI systems with tool calling, planning, memory, and human-in-the-loop workflows * Integrate with enterprise platforms including Slack, Salesforce, ServiceNow, SQL, Jira, SharePoint, and internal knowledge systems * Build evaluation frameworks, monitoring, observability, and production reliability tooling * Debug complex production failures involving LLM behavior, tool execution, and orchestration * Work alongside the founding team to shape product strategy, architecture, and deployment best practices
Required Qualifications* Proven experience shipping production agentic AI systems * Hands-on experience with tool use, planning, persistent memory/state, and workflow orchestration * Strong Python and/or TypeScript engineering skills * Experience evaluating LLM performance using benchmarks, regression testing, or automated evaluations * Production engineering experience including observability, logging, tracing, debugging, rollbacks, and reliability * Experience integrating APIs and enterprise software * Customer-facing engineering mindset with excellent communication skills * Able to work onsite in Chatsworth, CA
Preferred Experience Experience with one or more of:* LangGraph * LangChain * LlamaIndex * DSPy * CrewAI * AutoGen * Temporal * Airflow * OpenTelemetry * RAG systems * Enterprise AI deployments * Security, permissions, and audit logging
Why Join?* Founding engineering role with significant ownership * Competitive salary plus meaningful equity * Work directly with experienced founders * Shape the future of enterprise AI infrastructure * Solve challenging real-world AI deployment problems—not demos
This search is being conducted confidentially by Recruits Lab on behalf of our client. If you've built production-ready AI agents and want to help define the future of enterprise software, we encourage you to apply.
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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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