Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Xplore, Inc.

$110K — $130K *
US-AnywhereRemote in Ontario, CA
Enterprise Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of software engineering, data engineering, or applied AI experience in production systems.
  • Hands-on experience deploying LLM-based or agentic applications beyond prototypes.
  • Strong proficiency in Python with skills in API design and asynchronous patterns.
  • Experience designing integrative AI solutions using REST or GraphQL and modern front-end frameworks like React.
  • Demonstrated systems thinking with the ability to analyze interconnected systems and make architectural decisions.
  • Ability to work with non-technical stakeholders to derive requirements from complex processes.
  • Sound understanding of AI system security and data handling protocols.

Responsibilities

  • Partner with process owners to map existing workflows and identify automation opportunities.
  • Design, build, and deploy agentic workflows for real business processes.
  • Integrate agentic capabilities into web applications and design necessary APIs.
  • Define acceptance criteria and measurable outcomes for projects with stakeholders.
  • Ensure reliability of deployments through extensive monitoring and failure management.
  • Establish guardrails for production AI systems to ensure compliance and security.
  • Create reusable components to enhance workflow deployment efficiency and safety.
  • Document architecture decisions and operational runbooks for team understanding and future extension.

Benefits

  • Collaborative work environment with focus on innovation.
  • Opportunities for continuous learning and professional development.
  • Flexible work arrangements to promote work-life balance.
  • Access to cutting-edge technology and resources in AI.
Full Job Description
As an AI Developer on Xplore's Data & AI team, you will design, build, and deploy the agentic workflows and AI-enabled applications that change how the business runs - across network operations, customer experience, field services, and back-office functions.

There are more problems worth solving here than any single roadmap can hold. That is why this role is built for a systems thinker. You will need to see how systems connect: where a process actually breaks versus where it merely looks broken, which upstream system owns the truth, what a change does three steps downstream, and which piece of scaffolding built today makes the next five workflows cheaper to ship. You will be expected to bring a point of view on sequencing, not just execution.

Unlike a research-oriented ML engineer focused on model development, or a software engineer focused on a single application surface, your specialty is orchestration and integration: decomposing messy, human-shaped processes into reliable, observable, governed agentic systems.

Key Responsibilities Include:
  • Partner with process owners across operations, engineering, and corporate functions to map existing workflows end to end, identify high-value automation candidates, and distinguish what should be automated from what should first be redesigned or retired.
  • Design, build, and deploy production agentic workflows - tool use, retrieval, multi-step orchestration, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints - that execute real business processes rather than demonstrate them.
  • Integrate agentic capabilities into existing and new web applications, building the services, APIs, and user-facing touchpoints through which people interact with agents.
  • Define what "working" looks like with stakeholders before building: acceptance criteria, quality thresholds, and measurable process outcomes such as cycle time, human touch rate, error rate, and cost per transaction.
  • Own the reliability of everything you deploy: evaluation harnesses, regression testing against real cases, monitoring and tracing, known failure modes, graceful degradation, and clear escalation paths back to humans.
  • Establish and enforce guardrails for AI systems in production, including least-privilege data and tool access, sensitive data handling, prompt injection and tool-abuse mitigation, and full auditability of agent actions.
  • Build reusable platform components - shared connector and tool libraries, orchestration patterns, prompt and evaluation scaffolding - so each new workflow ships faster and safer than the last.
  • Produce architecture documentation, decision records, and operational runbooks so owned systems can be understood, operated, and extended by others.
  • Advise leadership on AI opportunity sizing and sequencing, including honest assessment of what is not yet ready for production and why.


The ideal candidate will possess:

  • 5+ years of software engineering, data engineering, or applied AI experience, with recent hands-on delivery of production systems.
  • Demonstrated experience taking LLM-based or agentic applications into production with real users - beyond prototypes and proofs of concept.
  • Strong Python skills, including API design, asynchronous patterns, and service architecture.
  • Practical fluency with agentic building blocks: tool and function calling, retrieval, context management, state and memory, multi-step orchestration, and the tradeoffs between competing approaches.
  • Sufficient full-stack capability to integrate AI into web applications: REST or GraphQL API design, authentication and authorization, and working competence with a modern front-end framework such as React.
  • Systems thinking demonstrated in practice: the ability to reason about coupling, failure propagation, and second-order effects across connected systems, and to defend architectural tradeoffs to both engineers and executives.
  • Proven ability to work directly with non-technical stakeholders to elicit requirements from ambiguous, undocumented, or contested processes.
  • Sound judgment on security and data handling in AI systems, including access scoping, secrets management, and sensitive data classification.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills; comfort presenting technical decisions and tradeoffs to Director and VP-level audiences.

Preferred Qualifications
  • Experience with agent evaluation and observability tooling, including tracing, offline and online evaluation, and structured human review.
  • Experience implementing AI governance, acceptable-use, or model risk frameworks in an enterprise or regulated environment.
  • Familiarity with emerging tool-integration standards such as the Model Context Protocol, and with connecting agents to enterprise systems of record.
  • Background in telecommunications, network operations, or infrastructure environments.
  • Experience with cloud platforms and containerized deployment, and with CI/CD for AI-enabled services.
  • Experience working against a governed enterprise data platform such as Databricks, including catalog-based access controls.
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

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