Forward Deployed Engineer (Lead)

Our Mission

Our mission is to build open superintelligence and make it accessible to all.

We’re developing open weight models for individuals, agents, enterprises, and even nation states. Our team of AI researchers and company builders come from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Brain, Meta, Character.AI, Anthropic and beyond.

Role Overview

We’re looking for a founding member of our Applied AI team, responsible for building our Forward Deployed Engineering function. This team plays a critical role in bridging our cutting-edge AI research with real-world enterprise deployments. As a founding Forward Deployed Engineer, you will own the end-to-end technical strategy, execution, and delivery of complex agentic applications, from early pre-sales discovery through production deployment.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with Deployment Strategists and Sales to understand enterprise customer needs, architect solutions, and develop transformative agentic applications.
• Build agentic solutions leveraging state-of-the-art models, orchestrating complex LLM workflows, integrating with enterprise infrastructure, and deploying robust production systems.
• Collaborate with research teams to adapt and fine-tune models for customer-specific needs, contributing to our internal codebase for inference, fine-tuning, and evaluation.
• Lead end-to-end deployment across hybrid environments (public cloud, VPC, or on-premises), ensuring scalability, performance, and reliability.
• Shape the Forward Deployed Engineering organization by defining playbooks, processes, best practices, and technical foundations to support the team's growth.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background with experience shipping production-grade systems (Python, Typescript)
• Proven track record of deploying enterprise software in cloud or hybrid environments using modern DevOps practices (Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD).
• Deep understanding of machine learning concepts and hands-on experience with modern AI stacks, including vector databases, RAG pipelines, agent orchestration, evaluations, and fine-tuning.
• 6+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years in a technical leadership capacity delivering AI-driven enterprise solutions (e.g., Lead Forward Deployed Engineer, Tech Lead, or Engineering Manager).
• Demonstrated ability and interest to work in customer-facing environments, understanding user needs, architecting solutions for real business problems, and delivering tangible outcomes.
• Self-starter with high agency and ownership, excelling in fast-paced startup environments where playbooks are still being written.

What We Offer:

We believe that to build superintelligence that is truly open, you need to start at the foundation. Joining us means building from the ground up as part of a small talent-dense team. You will help define our future as a company, and help define the frontier of open foundational models.

We want you to do the most impactful work of your career with the confidence that you and the people you care about most are supported.

• Top-tier compensation: Salary and equity structured to recognize and retain the best talent globally.
• Health & wellness: Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
• Life & family: Fully paid parental leave for all new parents, including adoptive and surrogate journeys. Financial support for family planning.
• Benefits & balance: paid time off when you need it, relocation support, and more perks that optimize your time.
• Opportunities to connect with teammates: lunch and dinner are provided daily. We have regular off-sites and team celebrations.