Forward Deployed Engineer
Crunchyroll, LLC5 hours ago
Base Salary
$183k - $229k/yr
Responsibilities
- Embed with business teams to map real workflows, identify pain points, and find opportunities for AI or automation.
- Translate ambiguous business problems into technical plans covering architecture, data flows, integrations, permissions, tooling, success criteria, and build-versus-buy decisions.
- Rapidly prototype solutions and determine when to use agentic systems, generative AI, RAG, classical ML, deterministic automation, or conventional software.
- Design and build reliable AI systems involving tool use, orchestration, prompt and context engineering, state and memory, structured outputs, APIs, enterprise integrations, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
- Engineer for failure handling, hallucinations, retries, permissions, latency, cost, security constraints, and graceful degradation.
- Build evaluations and production observability covering tracing, logging, monitoring, cost, quality, and drift.
- Work with business and technical leaders, manage expectations, surface risks, and keep stakeholders aligned.
- Monitor solutions after launch, iterate based on usage and feedback, and support adoption and change management.
- Create reusable components, patterns, tools, documentation, ownership models, and maintenance paths for future AI solutions.
Requirements
- 6+ years of software engineering experience, including significant recent experience building and shipping applied AI or LLM-powered systems in production.
- Demonstrated experience designing, building, and deploying AI systems that interact with APIs, enterprise systems, data sources, or external tools to complete multi-step tasks.
- Strong Python skills and deep experience with tool and function calling, orchestration, prompt and context engineering, structured outputs, RAG, model APIs, state management, and enterprise integrations.
- Experience taking AI solutions from ambiguous problem statements through architecture, prototyping, implementation, deployment, and iteration.
- Experience engineering AI systems for reliability through failure handling, human-in-the-loop controls, guardrails, permissions, monitoring, cost management, and latency management.
- Strong judgment about when to use agents, RAG, classical ML, automation, or conventional software.
- Ability to work directly with non-technical stakeholders and translate business needs into practical technical solutions.
- Strong product and business judgment and comfort operating in ambiguous, early-stage environments.
- Preferred experience includes forward-deployed, embedded, solutions engineering, applied AI, or highly cross-functional engineering work.
- Preferred experience includes agentic systems, APIs, MCP, event-driven systems, enterprise SaaS integrations, internal platforms, SDKs, reusable tooling, LLM evaluation and observability, multi-agent systems, workflow analysis, AI governance, and security or privacy review processes.
- Experience in media, entertainment, streaming, consumer technology, or complex content and operational workflows is a plus.
Benefits
- Salary plus performance bonus earning potential, paid annually.
- Flexible time off policies.
- Medical, dental, vision, short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance.
- Health Savings Account and health care and dependent care FSA programs.
- 401(k) plan with employer match.
- Employer-paid commuter benefit.
- New-parent support program.
- Pet insurance and some pet-friendly offices.
- Hybrid work arrangement is indicated by the posting.
Tech Stack
DatadogPython
Categories
Forward Deployed
About Crunchyroll, LLC
Crunchyroll, LLC runs a global anime-focused streaming service with subscription and ad-supported tiers, plus manga, games, theatrical releases, and an e-commerce store for merchandise. It serves fans in 200+ countries and territories and monetizes through subscriptions, advertising, and retail. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Los Angeles, it is owned by Sony through a joint venture between Sony Pictures Entertainment and Aniplex.