About the job Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Forward Deployed AI Engineer (ML / Full Stack)
Compensation: $115K-$200K base (varies by level and interview performance) + equity
Location: San Francisco, CA
Hiring Target: 2
Work Policy: 5 days/week in-office
Sponsorship: TN and OPT visa transfers supported
Stage: Seed-stage startup | $3.1M raised | YC-backed | Exclusive search

What Will You Do?
Own the end-to-end integration strategy for enterprise customers.
Act as the primary technical point of contact post-sale.
Partner with customers to understand risk workflows and configure the platform accordingly.
Design and implement GenAI-powered automations and agentic workflows.
Work hands-on with customer data backends and integrations.
Troubleshoot, optimize, and scale AI-driven systems in production.
Contribute to scripting, automation, and potentially core product improvements.

Role Breakdown
Approximately 70% customer interaction, platform configuration, and strategy.
Approximately 30% scripting, automation, and technical implementation.

What Will You Need?
Experience deploying enterprise B2B SaaS solutions.
Hands-on experience working with LLMs or GenAI systems in production.
Strong coding skills in Python, Java, TypeScript, or similar.
Comfort working with ambiguity and high-ownership environments.
Strong communication and interpersonal skills-this is a customer-facing engineering role.
Some startup experience or strong signals (top-tier companies, top schools, impressive GitHub).

Strongly Preferred
Experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer or AI Engineer at another AI startup.
Growth-stage startup experience.
Experience with enterprise integrations and AI system performance measurement (precision, recall, evaluation).
Understanding how LLM systems fail and how to mitigate those failures in production.

Must Not Have
Job hopping history.
Unexplained employment gaps.
Long-time manager/CTO returning to IC without recent hands-on depth.
Customer support-only background.
Consulting-only background.