About the job
A Forward Deployed Engineer II (FDE II) embeds directly inside a strategic enterprise customer to independently design, build, deploy, and run AI-powered production systems alongside the customer's engineering team. FDE IIs write production-grade software and own delivery of complete AI workstreams end-to-end — from requirements gathering through production deployment — combining the technical rigor of an AWS SDE with the urgency and ownership required to deliver measurable customer business outcomes.
Responsibilities
- Embed within customer engineering teams to understand business processes, technical architecture, and operational constraints, translating requirements into technical designs for AI-enabled production systems.
- Design and develop production-grade software powering AI and agentic workflows, including retrieval pipelines, workflow automation, API orchestration layers, and data integration.
- Own the full software development lifecycle including scoping, design, code, testing, deployment, operations, and maintenance, while troubleshooting production incidents across AI models and distributed systems.
- Implement monitoring, evaluations, guardrails, and CI/CD that keep AI systems healthy and routinely identify opportunities to improve operations.
- Actively mentor and train new team members on system construction and operation, and coach others on producing high-quality code through code review.
- Identify opportunities to expand AI adoption within customer engagements and codify reusable patterns and accelerators that benefit future deployments.
Qualifications
Minimum
- 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
- 2+ years of experience working in an Agile, startup, or rapidly scaling environment
- Experience communicating technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
- Experience with agentic and spec-driven development (developing AI agents a plus)
- Experience with AI tools: eval frameworks, agent tooling, RAG pipelines, and prompt engineering
- Current, active US Government Security Clearance of TS/SCI with Polygraph
Preferred
- Experience working with AWS Services
- Experience working in customer production environments
- Experience building or deploying AI/ML applications in production environments
- Background as a founder, engineering lead, or startup builder with high ownership and urgency
- Prior experience with React, TypeScript, Python, and/or Go
- Experience interfacing with customers or leading technical projects with external stakeholders
- Experience working with teams that build and scale end-to-end production systems