Forward Deployed Engineer Biopharma

Founding Forward Deployed Engineer Biopharma AI

Your opportunity

Our client is a well-funded venture-backed AI platform company on a mission to make life-saving drugs accessible and affordable for everyone. They build agentic AI and data infrastructure for the worlds largest pharmaceutical biologics and specialty chemical manufacturers helping them increase production efficiency reduce costs and minimize waste. Their thesis is that the bottleneck preventing therapies from reaching patients at scale is not scientific its operational: manual fragmented paper-heavy processes across regulated manufacturing. The faster that bottleneck clears the faster medicine gets to the people who need it.

As their founding forward deployed engineer youll be the first hire on a new team sitting at the intersection of the product and enterprise customers. Youll split time between core product engineering and building within their customers environments. Success in this role means understanding the customers data environments deploying and configuring the platform building custom integrations and workflows and ensuring the product delivers real measurable value. This is not a sales engineering or solutions consulting role. You will write production code in the customers environment on their data with an expectation that 80% of what you build merges back into the main platform. You will also heavily influence the product roadmap by serving as a critical feedback loop between customers and the internal product and engineering teams.

The product surface spans an operational data platform an AI-powered document intelligence layer distributed natively on Snowflake a raw material variability and genealogy analytics product and most recently a GxP-grade AI agent for shop-floor decision-making that integrates with MES QMS and LIMS systems to produce traceable audit-ready insights. The company has collected several awards and accolades and established strategic global distribution partnerships spanning North America Europe the Middle East and India. Their reference customers include some of the worlds largest pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturers.

Our client prioritizes talent density and has built a high-ownership high-autonomy environment with a track record of fostering accelerated professional development.

Please note that while the overwhelming majority of forward deployed work happens remotely there is very occasional travel (roughly twice annually) to customer sites across North America and Europe.

Key responsibilities

• Product engineering: Translate customer needs and pain points into actionable signals for the internal product and engineering teams and merge the majority of what you build back into the main platform

• End-to-end deployment ownership: Own the platform deployment into enterprise pharma and manufacturing accounts from kickoff through go-live and ongoing stewardship observability alerting and incident response

• Customer-specific integrations and workflow extensions: Build connectors between customer systems and the platform and adapt the workflow orchestration engine to customer-specific process requirements

• LLM pipeline configuration and tuning: Configure and extend AI-powered document processing pipelines (LLM extraction RAG structured output validation) for customer document types against accuracy latency and cost acceptance criteria

• Enterprise enablement: Navigate security reviews SSO integrations VPC configurations and GxP/SOC 2/HIPAA compliance requirements alongside customer IT data engineering and operations teams

• Customer-facing technical leadership: Represent the company technically in customer meetings workshops and executive briefings and create the technical documentation runbooks and integration guides

Tech stack

• Backend: Python (Django FastAPI asyncio) TypeScript ( Typescript ( Nx monorepo)

• AI/ML: Commercial and open-source LLMs AWS Textract PaddleOCR embeddings / vector search

• Data: Snowflake (Snowpark) PostgreSQL S3 dbt pandas

• Job orchestration: BullMQ Redis

• Infrastructure: AWS (ECS/Fargate RDS CloudFront Lambda) Terraform Docker

• Observability: OpenTelemetry Datadog CloudWatch

Your know-how

• You have 6 years of experience as a software engineer and have recent experience with field deployments and shipping software inside customer environments

• You are very comfortable with Python production-grade system design and async patterns

• You have experience shipping LLM-enabled features and products and are familiar with prompt engineering schema validation and cost/latency optimization

• You have experience deploying and operating AWS (or comparable) infrastructure with Terraform

• You have a fantastic command of English and are equally comfortable presenting to executive stakeholders and pairing with hands-on engineers

• You have a practical handle on security and compliance constraints and considerations (SOC 2 HIPAA GxP or similar)

• You are comfortable working with fuzzy problems and have a high sense of ownership over your work

Its a bonus if

• You have pharmaceutical biotech biopharma or regulated manufacturing domain knowledge or an acute interest in learning about these domains

• Youre drawn to mission-driven work and the idea of helping make life-saving therapies more accessible speaks to you directly

• You have experience with document processing OCR (AWS Textract PaddleOCR) or production RAG systems

• You have experience helping scale an enterprise B2B venture