Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (AWS)

Quick Facts

• Role: Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), embedded at a strategic enterprise customer
• Focus: AI-powered production systems (agents/workflows) from prototype to enterprise deployment
• Travel: 30–50%

Description

You will embed with customer engineering teams to translate business problems into scalable, AI-enabled production systems. The role involves designing and developing production-grade software for agentic workflows, retrieval and orchestration, integrating foundation models, customer data sources, APIs, and existing applications. You will own the systems end-to-end, including production operations (monitoring, evaluations, guardrails, reliability, security, and incident response).

Responsibilities

• Embed within customer engineering teams to understand business processes, architecture, and operational constraints
• Build production AI applications (orchestration for multi-agent systems, retrieval pipelines, workflow automation, decision intelligence)
• Integrate foundation models with customer data sources, APIs, and existing applications
• Optimize for latency, reliability, observability, cost, and security
• Own production rollout and operationalization; troubleshoot incidents across AI models, distributed systems, data pipelines, and services
• Establish monitoring, evaluations, guardrails, and operational mechanisms (testing, CI/CD, rollback, resiliency)
• Accelerate customer transformation by identifying new AI adoption opportunities and codifying reusable patterns/architectures
• Mentor engineers and contribute best practices back to AWS; push reusable components and learnings

Requirements

• 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language
• 5+ years leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability, scaling) of new and existing systems
• Experience as a mentor, tech lead, or leading an engineering team
• Experience communicating technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences, including senior stakeholders
• Experience leading agentic and spec-driven development at production scale (experience developing AI agents is a plus)
• Experience with AI tools: evaluation frameworks, agent tooling, RAG pipelines, and prompt engineering

Benefits

• Base salary range (USA, WA, Seattle): $168,100–$227,400 annually
• Sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs)
• Comprehensive benefits: health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D; supplemental life options), EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement
• 401(k) matching
• Paid time off
• Parental leave