AI Lead Engineer (Forward-Deployed Engineer)

Quick Facts

• Role: AI Lead Engineer (Forward-Deployed Engineer)

• Setting: Embedded with a hedge fund or investment management firm

• Schedule: 4 days onsite with the client, 1 day remote

• Duration: 12+ months

Description

Embed with a hedge fund or investment management firm as the technical lead to deploy and customize production AI workflows. You own end-to-end delivery—from backend integrations to the user-facing interfaces—and iterate based on fast feedback from the people who actually use the system. The work is heavily focused on building production AI, including agents, retrieval, evaluation suites, and human-in-the-loop review.

Requirements

• 5+ years of production software engineering

• Full-stack delivery with strong Python and TypeScript; React experience for user-facing UI

• Design of production APIs and integrations with SDLC rigor (code review, testing, versioned releases, documented decisions)

• Hands-on production AI experience: agents, retrieval, evaluation suites, human-in-the-loop governance

• Practical knowledge of real-world RAG: chunking, reranking, and grounding evaluation

• Ability to select and defend off-the-shelf agent frameworks vs custom orchestration

• Track record owning a bounded client engagement from kickoff to production within 90–180 days

• Experience in a regulated or operationally complex environment with audit trails and evidence

• Comfort being measured on deployment outcomes (time-to-first-value, production reliability, user activation, and referenceability)

• Disposition to own a customer-facing deployment end to end

• Ability to work onsite 4 days/week in New York, NY and remote 1 day/week

• Cannot be sponsored

Benefits

• Embedded, long-duration ownership of a single client deployment (not rotating through customer logos)

• Short feedback loop with real users and stakeholders

• Opportunity to lead production deployment of modern AI workflows in a complex, regulated environment