Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) – AI/GenAI & Telecom
Role Description
Job Title: Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) – AI/GenAI & Telecom
Location: Stamford, CT
Experience: 10–15+ Years
Key Responsibilities
- Work with business, product, operations, and engineering teams to identify technical challenges and deliver practical AI solutions.
- Design and deploy GenAI/LLM applications, RAG pipelines, semantic search, and enterprise AI assistants.
- Develop agentic workflows using LangChain, LangGraph, or similar frameworks.
- Build backend services and integrations using Python, FastAPI, REST APIs, GraphQL, SQL, and microservices.
- Integrate AI solutions with enterprise applications, knowledge systems, operational platforms, and APIs.
- Implement embeddings, vector databases, retrieval optimization, LLM evaluation, guardrails, and observability.
- Deploy containerized applications using Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Troubleshoot production issues and optimize application reliability, performance, scalability, and cost.
- Collaborate with product and engineering teams to improve reusable AI capabilities based on deployment feedback.
Required Skills
- Strong hands-on Python programming and software engineering experience.
- Recent experience building and deploying production GenAI/LLM applications.
- RAG, embeddings, vector databases, document retrieval, and semantic search.
- Agentic AI and orchestration using LangChain and/or LangGraph.
- FastAPI, REST APIs, GraphQL, SQL, and microservices.
- Cloud experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, monitoring, and production troubleshooting.
- Strong analytical, communication, and customer-facing problem-solving skills.
Preferred Skills
- Telecom, cable, or broadband industry experience.
- Familiarity with OSS/BSS, CRM, customer-care, network operations, and field-service platforms.
- Experience developing AI-powered troubleshooting, operational automation, or enterprise knowledge assistants.
Pay: $65.00 - $70.00 per hour
Application Question(s):
- How many years of experience do you have?
Work Location: In person
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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