Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Operational AI

Quick Facts

• Role: Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Operational AI)
• Focus: Production integration and delivery of real-time operational AI systems

Description

As AI transitions from analysis into action, enterprises need an operational foundation that connects autonomous workflows to live, authoritative state with low latency and strict runtime controls. As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), you embed with customer engineering teams to build and ship these real-time systems, validate performance under production workloads, and help convert solutions into reusable libraries, reference architectures, and tooling.

Responsibilities

• Build and deploy real-time distributed data models for agent, session, and workflow state with freshness, consistency, and failover recovery
• Implement context assembly pipelines that join transactional data, streaming sources, vector search indexes, and graph relationships
• Integrate execution guardrails including policy checks, authentication/authorization boundaries, execution governors, and human-in-the-loop review
• Add auditing and traceability via logging and tracing of context snapshots, decisions, tool execution, and state mutations
• Connect closed-loop execution flows so downstream results reliably inform the next cycle
• Embed with customer teams to translate requirements into technical designs, integration plans, and delivery milestones
• Write and integrate production code across Aerospike, enterprise data systems, vector engines, and agent orchestration frameworks
• Validate production readiness by debugging distributed systems, profiling bottlenecks, and ensuring reliability under high traffic
• Benchmark and test real-world operational characteristics, including p99 latency, throughput, cache invalidation, context freshness, failure recovery, and policy enforcement
• Build reusable field assets such as starter kits, SDK wrappers, test fixtures, and documentation
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Core Engineering, and Solutions to resolve platform bugs and support deployment best practices

Requirements

• 5–8+ years of hands-on software development experience building and deploying backend services, distributed systems, or high-throughput data platforms in production
• Fluency in at least one modern backend language: Go, Java, Python, or C/C++
• Strong fundamentals in concurrency, API design, and asynchronous patterns
• Practical experience with low-latency key-value stores, distributed databases, or streaming data platforms (e.g., Kafka, Redis, Cassandra, Aerospike)
• Hands-on experience building services that interface with LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector databases, or agent frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, Temporal)
• Experience implementing authentication/authorization (OAuth, RBAC/ABAC), data validation, and auditable logging in sensitive environments
• Ability to navigate ambiguous requirements, communicate technical trade-offs, and work independently with minimal oversight

Benefits

• Competitive base salary
• Equity options
• 401(k) matching
• Comprehensive health/dental/vision coverage
• Remote home office support