Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

The role

The Senior Forward Deployed Engineer executes core technical work on difficult client problems. You will own architecture, technical tradeoffs, and the end-to-end delivery of production AI systems.

What you will do

• Own end-to-end delivery quality for a major engagement, workstream, or solution area.
• Translate ambiguous client needs into practical execution plans and technical milestones.
• Lead solution architecture and technical decision-making.
• Make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, quality, scope, maintainability, cost, latency, and client value.
• Review critical technical work before it is shared with clients.
• Design and ship AI/ML solutions using Python, modern ML frameworks, LLM orchestration tooling, and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Integrate LLMs and other generative models into client products and workflows.
• Own fine-tuning, prompt engineering, retrieval, and evaluation pipelines.
• Act as the senior technical voice on engagements.
• Mentor less experienced FDEs through technical review, pairing, and practical feedback.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including significant backend or full-stack depth.
• Track record of independently owning complex, ambiguous technical work from definition through production.
• Strong programming skills in Python.
• Fluency in at least one additional language (JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, or similar).
• Demonstrated experience delivering real-world ML/AI systems in production.
• Deep comfort with modern cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD workflows.
• Excellent client communication.

Nice to have

• Substantial production experience with LLMs (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI, Cohere), vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, or agentic systems.
• Prior consulting, professional services, solutions architecture, or forward-deployed engineering experience.
• Familiarity with MLOps practices and tooling (e.g., MLflow, Weights & Biases, SageMaker).
• Working knowledge of enterprise security, data privacy, and compliance constraints.
• Experience mentoring engineers through influence rather than authority.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation (salary + annual bonus).
• Equity options in a growing AI services company.
• Fully remote work
• WFH stipend
• Monthly lifestyle stipend
• A genuine senior IC track
• Autonomy to solve hard problems
• Flexibility to work across industries and problem domains

About the company

Eliza is a technology services company and Advanced-tier OpenAI partner that’s dedicated to helping organizations build and deploy cutting-edge AI solutions. Their projects combine deep technical expertise with hands-on client collaboration.