Staff Forward Deployment Engineer

Job Title: Staff Forward Deployment Engineer

Location: Bellevue WA

Duration: / Term: Contract

Experience Desired: 8 Years

Job Description:

Client is building founding Forward Deployment Engineering team and were looking for seasoned engineers to set the bar. As a Senior/Staff FDE you sit at the intersection of engineering and the customer. You embed directly with internal business teams and external partners to take powerful platforms AI/GenAI tools data products and custom integrations and turn them into working solutions that deliver real outcomes. You are part builder part problem-solver and part trusted advisor: writing production code one day mapping a messy real-world workflow the next and advising senior stakeholders on strategy by the end of the week.

This is a high-impact role for an experienced engineer who has done the work before thrives in ambiguity and operates with little oversight. As one of the first FDEs you wont just deploy solutions youll define how this team works: the playbooks the standards the tooling and the bar for everyone who follows. Youll also mentor more junior engineers as the team scales.

What Youll Do:

• Embed with internal teams and external customers to understand their workflows pain points and goals then design and deploy solutions that fit.
• Build production-quality code integrations and automations across AI/GenAI data and software platforms to solve concrete business problems.
• Prototype rapid prototypes and proofs-of-concept iterate based on direct user feedback and move them into reliable scalable production.
• Integrate data pipelines APIs and third-party systems handling the real-world messiness of enterprise environments.
• Partner with end users and stakeholders running demos gathering requirements troubleshooting live and translating technical concepts into business value.
• Feed recurring pain points and friction back to product and engineering teams to influence the core roadmap.
• Monitor and improve solutions for reliability performance and adoption after launch you own outcomes not just deliverables.
• Establish the playbooks standards and tooling for the FDE function and mentor junior engineers as the team grows.

What Youll Bring:

• Experience: 8 years building and shipping software in production including significant time owning complex ambiguous projects end-to-end with minimal supervision.
• Technical depth: Deep hands-on programming expertise (e.g. Python JavaScript/TypeScript Java or Go) strong system design judgment and fluency working across the full stack and with APIs.
• Platform fluency: Proven experience with data tools (SQL pipelines warehouses such as Snowflake/Databricks) and/or AI/GenAI tooling (LLMs RAG agentic workflows). You bring real breadth and adapt quickly to the right tool for the problem.
• Customer-facing track record: A track record of customer-facing or forward-deployed work youve shipped solutions directly with end users navigated enterprise complexity and earned the trust of senior stakeholders.
• Leadership: Youve led projects set technical direction and raised the bar for those around you formally or informally.
• Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication; you translate fluidly between deep technical detail and executive-level business value.
• Bias for action: You ship learn and iterate quickly at a high quality bar and you bring order to ambiguous fast-moving situations.

Nice to Have:

• Experience deploying AI/ML or LLM-based solutions in an enterprise setting.
• Cloud experience (AWS GCP or Azure) and familiarity with CI/CD and containerization.
• Experience as a founding or early member of a new team or function.
• Telecommunications or large-scale enterprise data domain knowledge.

Key Skills:

programming expertise (Java or Python) data tools (Snowflake/Databricks) AI/GenAI tooling (LLMs RAG agentic workflows)