Forward Deployed Engineer
Robots and Pencils2 months ago
Base Salary
$177k - $210k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead the design and implementation of complex AI/ML systems from research through production in client environments.
- Build, deploy, and evolve scalable ML platforms, pipelines, and infrastructure for reliable model development and deployment.
- Diagnose and resolve integration challenges across unfamiliar codebases, cloud environments, and organizational contexts.
- Embed with client teams, translate business problems into effective AI system designs, and drive post-delivery adoption.
- Partner with product, engineering, and leadership stakeholders and communicate technical tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Define AI architecture, engineering standards, responsible AI practices, and long-term technical direction for engagements.
- Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through coaching, code reviews, pairing, and technical discussions.
- Own ambiguous and high-stakes work through production while managing reliability, cost, safety, and scalability.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 4+ years focused on production AI/ML systems and deep hands-on generative AI development.
- Expert software engineering background using Python or a similar language, with strong scalable-system design skills.
- Deep expertise with cloud platforms, including AWS services and AWS GenAI offerings.
- Proven experience designing and shipping complex agentic systems in production, including under client or enterprise constraints.
- Mastery of AI frameworks and orchestration tools, plus strong experience with LLM application evaluation and observability.
- Deep understanding of AI safety, responsible AI, prompt injection defenses, and PII handling.
- Extensive experience building RAG pipelines, including chunking strategies, embedding models, vector databases, and advanced retrieval techniques.
- Experience designing and integrating internal and third-party APIs at scale.
- Advanced cost optimization expertise covering token economics, caching, model routing, and quantization.
- Strong working knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes for containerized deployments.
- Expert day-to-day use of AI-forward coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor.
- Ability to operate in ambiguous, fast-moving client environments, communicate clearly, and build engineering-level trust.
Tech Stack
Categories
Forward Deployed
About Robots and Pencils
Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm that designs, builds, and runs production AI systems and agentic co-workers for enterprise operations, with a focus on AWS. The privately held company, founded in 2009 and headquartered in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, provides consulting and implementation services spanning data readiness, cloud modernization, and AI enablement. It is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner with delivery teams across the U.S., Canada, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.