Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Forward Deployed AI Engineer | Enterprise AI Startup | Berlin Location: Berlin (On-site + customer travel) Employment: Full-time Package: Competitive salary + Equity AI Futures has been exclusively retained to identify a forward deployed AI Engineer for a well-funded, early-stage AI company based in Berlin. This is a role for an engineer who doesn't want to spend their entire week behind a screen. You'll work directly with enterprise customers, understand how they operate and then build the software and AI solutions that solve their problems. The company is looking for someone who can combine strong engineering ability with the communication skills and commercial curiosity required to work directly with users. The Role You'll own problems from customer conversation through to production. That could mean understanding a customer's workflow, identifying why an AI system isn't producing the expected result, building an integration into their existing technology or shipping a new product capability. You'll work across software engineering, applied AI and customer delivery, with significant autonomy over how problems are solved. Responsibilities include: Work directly with enterprise customers to understand their processes and technical challenges.Turn ambiguous customer requirements into clear technical solutions.Design, build and ship production software.Develop and improve AI and LLM-powered applications.Investigate how AI systems behave in real-world environments and identify opportunities to improve them.Work with prompts, context, tools and application logic to improve AI performance.Build APIs and integrations connecting customer systems and data.Work across backend and product engineering where required.Analyse production issues and turn recurring problems into scalable improvements.Take ownership from initial discovery through implementation, rollout and iteration.Feed customer insights directly back into the wider product.Work closely with AI, Product and Engineering teams. Who We're Looking For Strong Software Engineering fundamentals.Experience building and shipping software used by real customers.Strong backend or full-stack engineering experience.Experience with Python and/or TypeScript.Comfortable working with APIs, SQL and modern web applications.Experience building LLM or Generative AI applications would be highly desirable.Exposure to enterprise integrations or complex customer environments is advantageous.Comfortable investigating and improving the behaviour of AI applications.Strong problem-solving skills and ability to operate without a detailed specification.Excellent communication and customer-facing skills.Commercial curiosity - you want to understand why customers work the way they do, not simply what code needs to be written.High level of ownership and initiative.Comfortable moving between customer meetings and hands-on engineering.Previous startup or early-stage experience would be advantageous.Happy to work primarily from Berlin and travel to customer sites when required. Why Join? Join an early-stage AI company while the product and engineering organisation are still being shaped.Build AI products that are actively used within large organisations.Work directly with customers and see the impact of what you build.Significant ownership from problem discovery through to production.Work across Applied AI, Software Engineering and enterprise delivery.Direct exposure to the founding and technical leadership teams.Influence product direction based on what you learn in the field.Meaningful equity participation and long-term upside.High-autonomy environment where strong engineers can have an outsized impact. This is particularly suited to an engineer who enjoys both building software and working with people. If you'd rather understand a problem firsthand, build the solution and see it being used than work through a backlog of isolated engineering tickets, we'd like to hear from you. Apply for a confidential discussion. AI Futures Ltd | Filling the AI Skills Gap®