Forward Deployed Engineer
Robots and Pencils2 months ago
Remote, CanadaStaff+
Responsibilities
- Lead end-to-end design and implementation of complex ML/AI systems within client environments, from research through production.
- 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 practical AI system designs, and drive adoption after delivery.
- Partner with product, engineering, and leadership teams to align technical direction with business outcomes.
- Lead design reviews, technical discussions, and engineering standards while communicating AI tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Develop AI architecture, responsible AI practices, enablement materials, and client engineering capabilities.
- Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through coaching, code reviews, and pairing, while owning ambiguous and high-stakes production work.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 4+ years focused on AI/ML systems in production.
- Expert software engineering background using Python or a similar language, with strong scalable-systems design skills.
- Deep expertise with cloud platforms, including AWS services and AWS generative AI offerings.
- Proven experience designing and shipping complex agentic systems in production and enterprise client environments.
- Mastery of AI frameworks and orchestration tools, plus experience with LLM evaluation frameworks and observability tools.
- Strong understanding of AI safety, responsible AI, prompt injection defenses, and PII handling.
- Extensive experience building RAG pipelines involving chunking, embedding models, vector databases, and advanced retrieval techniques.
- Experience designing and integrating internal and third-party APIs at scale.
- Advanced expertise in AI cost optimization, including token economics, caching, model routing, and quantization.
- Strong working knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes for containerized deployments.
- Expert day-to-day use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor.
- Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous, fast-moving client environments and build trust with engineering stakeholders.
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.