AI Engineer

AI Engineer (Forward Deployed) SF/NYC / Travel / $200k-$350k + early stage equity My client is looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to sit at the intersection of engineering and customer delivery, building production AI systems directly with enterprise clients. You'll spend your time in customer environments, not just shipping code from behind a product spec, turning ambiguous real-world problems into working software that customers actually use. Day to day, that means building and deploying LLM-powered and agentic systems, retrieval-augmented applications, and getting GenAI features from prototype into reliable production use. You'll own the evaluation and reliability side too, not just the initial build, so what you ship keeps working after you leave the room. Strong fit for engineers coming from client-facing, applied-AI or consulting-led backgrounds, particularly those with experience at top-tier strategy or technical consulting firms. A strong CS degree is expected. What My Client Is Looking For: 3+ years of industry experienceComfortable operating with ambiguity and directly in front of customersStrong Python and/or TypeScript skills in production environmentsTrack record deploying data-heavy or AI-enabled applicationsAble to communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiencesOpen to travel, roughly 20 percentWants the pace and ownership of a startup environment Nice to Have: Prior forward-deployed or customer-facing engineering roleHands-on production experience with ML, LLMs, or agentic systemsFrontend experience, React preferred