Forward Deployed Architect – AILLM

Location: Vietnam/Bangkok
Type: Full-time Remote-friendly within SEA 30-50% travel to customers
Industry: Enterprise AI / Machine Learning / LLMOps

Confidential search on behalf of our client a top-tier AI company deploying LLMs in production for Fortune 500s

Our client builds and deploys production-grade LLM systems for Fortune 500s. No slideware. No 12-month POCs. Forward Deployed Architects embed with customers from Day 1 to ship AI that moves P&L.

Their customers stay because the AI works. Churn is near-zero. Now theyre building the founding SEA technical team and have retained Newbridge to lead the search.

You are 50% engineer 50% trusted advisor 100% owner of customer outcomes.

As a Forward Deployed Architect you will:

• Deploy with customers: Embed on-site/virtual with CTOs VPs of Engineering Data Science teams. Week 1 in their repo not in a workshop
• Ship production AI: Scope prototype and harden RAG agents fine-tunes eval pipelines on customer data. Own it from demo prod
• Be the technical voice in sales: Partner with Sales Leads. Kill bad deals early. Make good deals unbeatable by proving it works
• Bridge product customer: Feed real-world edge cases data issues and infra constraints back to core Eng. You shape the roadmap
• Post-sales: You dont throw over the wall. You stay embedded until the customer is getting ROI. Then you help them expand

Tech youll touch: Python PyTorch/TensorFlow LangChain/LlamaIndex vector DBs Kubernetes AWS/GCP/Azure eval frameworks enterprise data systems. If its in a modern LLM stack youll see it.

1. 3 enterprise customers live in production with measurable ROI
2. <60 days average time from kickoff first prod deployment
3. Become the #1 technical reason a CTO chooses us over competitors
4. 2 new product features shipped because you found the gap

Youre the engineer every Sales Lead wants in the room. And customers ask for by name on the next project.

Must-haves:

• 8 years as ML Engineer Software Engineer Solutions Architect or Data Scientist in production environments
• Shipped ML/AI: Youve put models/data products in prod owned uptime debugging evals. LLM/RAG experience strongly preferred
• Full-stack comfort: Strong Python. Can read customers infra. Can write glue code spin up a K8s cluster debug a weird SQL query
• Customer-facing: You can whiteboard with a CTO then pair-program with their MLE. You explain tradeoffs clearly
• Builder mindset: Hate bureaucracy. Love messy 01 problems. Its not in the docs excites you
• Based in: Singapore KL Jakarta Bangkok or Manila. Passport willingness to be with customers 30-50% across SEA

Bonus:

• Forward Deployed experience: Ex-Palantir C3 Databricks Scale OpenAI Anthropic or similar
• Enterprise context: Worked with banks telcos governments conglomerates. Know security/compliance pain
• Fluent in: Bahasa Indonesia Thai Tagalog or Mandarin English
• Open source / writing: Blog posts repos talks that prove you can teach

1. Impact: Your code goes live in 60 days at the biggest companies in SEA. Not L6 promo packet in 18 months
2. Comp: Top 10% base for SEA meaningful equity in a rocketship. $180k$350k USD total comp
3. Team: Engineers from OpenAI DeepMind Palantir. No politics. No B-players
4. Growth: Path to founding Eng in your country Regional Field CTO or move to core product
5. Learning: See 10 different LLM deployments/year. Youll learn more in 1 year than 3 years in Big Tech