Willis Towers Watson

AI Engineer/Forward-Deployed Engineer

Willis Towers Watson$125K — $250K *
Enterprise Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in software engineering and technical leadership, preferably in enterprise-scale settings.
  • Strong design capabilities for production applications leveraging modern engineering practices like APIs and microservices.
  • Hands-on experience in building AI systems, including pipelines and predictive interfaces.
  • Proven reliability in managing business-critical systems for operational support and business impact.
  • Collaborative experience with cross-functional teams, including data scientists and product managers.
  • Demonstrated mentorship abilities and influence over engineering practices and standards.

Responsibilities

  • Design and deliver AI-enabled applications and tools using advanced models and orchestration frameworks.
  • Engage directly with business teams to identify and resolve workflow, data quality, and adoption challenges.
  • Develop and optimize workflows for large language models (LLMs) and establish agent orchestration strategies.
  • Integrate AI solutions with various enterprise systems and ensure comprehensive connectivity through APIs and data platforms.
  • Maintain production standards for AI solutions focusing on reliability, scalability, and operational support.
  • Create tools and workflows for evaluating the accuracy and effectiveness of AI outputs.
  • Lead the architectural design and establish technical standards for AI platforms and services.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health benefits including medical, dental, and vision coverage.
  • Generous paid time off including holidays and disability leave.
  • Robust retirement plans with a contributory pension and 401k options.
  • Employee assistance programs and wellbeing resources.
  • Flexible spending accounts for healthcare and dependent care.
Full Job Description
Job Description

The Role

The AI Engineer / Forward Deployed Engineer is responsible for designing, building, integrating, and operating production-grade AI solutions that solve real business problems inside complex enterprise environments. The role combines hands-on software engineering, AI solution architecture, customer or business stakeholder engagement, and end-to-end delivery ownership.

Unlike a traditional AI or software engineering role focused only on internal product backlogs, this role works close to the operational problem. The engineer translates ambiguous business needs into deployed AI-enabled workflows, connects enterprise systems and data sources, validates output quality, and ensures solutions are reliable, secure, cost-effective, and adopted by users.

This position is ideal for an experienced Solutions Architect, Staff Engineer, or Technical Lead with a strong enterprise engineering background and a passion for applying it to AI-enabled systems. You'll bring deep expertise across modern full-stack technologies (.NET, Azure, SQL, React/Angular), along with experience in distributed systems, observability, and AI tooling such as LLMs, retrieval pipelines, and agentic workflows.
Acting as a bridge between business and technology, you'll work across product, data science, architecture, and engineering teams-mentoring others, resolving production challenges, and scaling prototypes into robust, enterprise-grade solutions that deliver real impact.

The Responsibilities
  • AI solution delivery: Design and build AI-enabled applications, copilots, agents, extraction pipelines, prediction interfaces, and decision-support tools using foundation models, retrieval-augmented generation, structured outputs, and orchestration frameworks.
  • Forward deployed problem solving: Work directly with business teams, product owners, clients, or operational users to understand real workflows, constraints, data quality issues, and adoption barriers, then translate these into working technical solutions.
  • LLM and agent engineering: Build and tune LLM workflows, prompt strategies, schema-driven extraction, tool-calling patterns, agent orchestration, evaluation loops, and human-in-the-loop controls.
  • Enterprise integration: Integrate AI solutions with enterprise systems, APIs, data platforms, document repositories, workflow tools, observability platforms, and identity and access management services.
  • Production engineering: Ensure AI solutions meet enterprise standards for reliability, scalability, latency, maintainability, cost control, logging, monitoring, and operational support.
  • Evaluation and quality assurance: Create evaluation datasets, test harnesses, validation tools, regression checks, and quality review workflows to measure accuracy, extraction quality, hallucination risk, and business usefulness.
  • Architecture and technical leadership: Define solution architecture, engineering standards, reusable patterns, and implementation approaches for AI-enabled platforms and services.
  • Data and knowledge readiness: Work with engineering, data, and business teams to prepare structured and unstructured data, improve metadata, design retrieval strategies, and identify gaps in source content.
  • Security, privacy, and governance: Embed access controls, audit logging, data protection, responsible AI controls, security review, and compliance requirements into the AI delivery lifecycle.
  • Adoption and enablement: Support users through demos, pilots, training, feedback loops, documentation, and iterative improvement so that deployed AI solutions create measurable business value.


Qualifications

The Qualifications
  • Significant professional experience in software engineering, technical leadership, solutions architecture, or platform engineering, ideally in enterprise-scale environments.
  • Proven ability to design and deliver production applications using modern engineering practices, including APIs, distributed systems, microservices, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, and cloud platforms.
  • Hands-on experience building AI-enabled systems, such as LLM pipelines, document extraction, structured output generation, AI-assisted analytics, prediction interfaces, or agentic workflows.
  • Experience working with business-critical systems where reliability, maintainability, operational support, and measurable business impact are essential.
  • Experience collaborating with data scientists, product managers, QA teams, architects, security teams, and senior stakeholders.
  • Track record of mentoring engineers, leading technical delivery, establishing engineering standards, and influencing teams beyond direct line management.

This position will remain posted for a minimum of three business days from the date posted or until a sufficient/appropriate candidate slate has been identified

Compensation and Benefits

Base salary range and benefits information for this position are being included in accordance with requirements of various state/local pay transparency legislation. Please note that base salaries may vary for different individuals in the same role based on several factors, including but not limited to location of the role, individual competencies, education/professional certifications, qualifications/experience, performance in the role and potential for revenue generation.

Compensation

The base salary compensation range being offered for this role is $125,000-$250,000 USD per year.

This role is also eligible for an annual short-term incentive bonus

Company Benefits

WTW provides a competitive benefit package which includes the following (eligibility requirements apply):
  • Health and Welfare Benefits: Medical (including prescription coverage), Dental, Vision, Health Savings Account, Commuter Account, Health Care and Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts, Group Accident, Group Critical Illness, Life Insurance, AD&D, Group Legal, Identify Theft Protection, Wellbeing Program and Work/Life Resources (including Employee Assistance Program)
  • Leave Benefits: Paid Holidays, Annual Paid Time Off (includes paid state/local paid leave where required), Short-Term Disability, Long-Term Disability, Other Leaves (e.g., Bereavement, FMLA, ADA, Jury Duty, Military Leave, and Parental and Adoption Leave), Paid Time Off
  • Retirement Benefits: Contributory Pension Plan and Savings Plan (401k). All Level 38 and more senior roles may also be eligible for non-qualified Deferred Compensation and Deferred Savings Plans.

About Willis Towers Watson

Willis Towers Watson is a global insurance and risk management company that provides a range of services to clients in more than 140 countries. The company was formed in 2016 through the merger of Willis Group Holdings and Towers Watson & Co. Willis Towers Watson offers a range of insurance products, including property and casualty insurance, life insurance, and health insurance. The company also provides risk management and consulting services, including actuarial services, investment consulting, and human capital consulting. Willis Towers Watson is known for its expertise in risk management and its ability to help clients navigate complex insurance and regulatory environments.
Learn more about Willis Towers Watson
Size
46,000 employees
Market Cap
$26.2 billion
Industry
Net Income
$996 million
Founded
1828
5 Year Trend
+2.7%
Revenue
$9.3 billion
NASDAQ

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at Willis Towers Watson

More Enterprise Technology Jobs

Find similar AI Engineer/Forward-Deployed Engineer jobs: