A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) embeds directly inside a strategic enterprise customer to design, build, deploy, and run AI-powered production systems alongside the customer's engineering team. FDEs write production-grade software and own outcomes end-to-end, from prototype through enterprise-scale deployment combining the technical rigor of an AWS SDE with the urgency and ownership required to deliver measurable customer business outcomes. They create reusable architectures, patterns, and engineering mechanisms that scale the entire FDE practice.
Key job responsibilities
• Embed within customer engineering teams. Understand the customer's business processes, technical architecture, and operational constraints. Translate ambiguous business problems into scalable AI-enabled production systems. Requires 30 - 50% travel.
• Build production AI applications. Design and develop production-grade software powering AI and agentic workflows - orchestration layers for multi-agent systems, retrieval pipelines, workflow automation, decision intelligence. Integrate foundation models, customer data sources, APIs, and existing applications into cohesive AI experiences. Optimize for latency, reliability, observability, cost, and security.
• Own production. Take systems from design through production rollout and operationalization. Troubleshoot production incidents across AI models, distributed systems, data pipelines, and application services. Put in place monitoring, evaluations, guardrails, and the operational mechanisms (testing, CI/CD, rollback, resiliency) that keep AI systems healthy at scale.
• Accelerate customer transformation. Identify opportunities to expand AI adoption across customer workflows. Codify reusable patterns, accelerators, and reference architectures that benefit future customers and feed back into AWS.
• Raise the bar. Mentor engineers. Contribute to AWS engineering best practices for AI and forward deployment. Push reusable components and learnings back into AWS products and services.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
- 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team
- Experience communicating technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences, including senior stakeholders
- Experience leading agentic and spec-driven development at production scale (developing AI agents a plus)
- Experience with AI tools: eval frameworks, agent tooling, RAG pipelines, and prompt engineering
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
- Experience building or deploying AI/ML applications at enterprise production scale
- Background as a founder, engineering lead, or startup builder with high ownership and urgency
- Experience architecting and delivering complex, multi-component systems in customer production environments
- Experience with AWS services
- Experience with React, TypeScript, Python, and/or Go
- Experience leading customer-facing technical projects or managing external stakeholder relationships
- 3+ years of experience working in an Agile, startup, or rapidly scaling environment
The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.
USA, CA, East Palo Alto - 193,300.00 - 261,500.00 USD annually
USA, MA, Boston - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually
USA, NY, New York - 184,900.00 - 250,200.00 USD annually
USA, VA, Herndon - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually
USA, WA, Seattle - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually
