Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

The role

You will build industry-specific GPT reasoning layers and embed AI-native functionality into systems of record. You will also move legacy datasets into new AI-native ones and manage AI talent across operating companies.

What you will do

• Ship a working domain-specific agent into a live customer environment in your first 30 days
• Build the eval infrastructure to measure if agents replace human workflows
• Fine-tune, distill, or route across frontier and open models
• Sit with customers to instrument and rebuild workflows
• Write the AI engineering playbook for future portfolio companies
• Build the industry-specific GPT reasoning layer
• Embed AI-native functionality into systems of record
• Move legacy systems of record datasets into new ai-native ones
• Make the playbook, model stack, eval harness, and infra repeatable
• Manage AI talent across operating companies as a player-coach

Required qualifications

• Builder who has shipped things people actually use
• Forward-deployed engineer who will fly to customer sites and sit in their offices
• Demonstrated experience building and deploying production-grade AI/LLM harnesses that connect models to customer data, tools, APIs, and business workflows
• Experience with evaluation, observability, guardrails, and failure handling
• Strong opinions about when to fine-tune vs prompt vs RAG vs agent vs harness
• Built with the current frontier stack (Claude, GPT, Gemini, open models) in production

About the company

Atomic is a stealth holding company acquiring and operating software businesses in overlooked, mission-critical industries. They rebuild these businesses as AI-native from the inside out.