Forward Deployment Engineer

Work directly with clients to discover opportunities, build practical AI solutions, and guide implementation through deployment and adoption.

We're seeking Forward Deployment Engineers in Chicago who enjoy working where business needs meet engineering. You'll help clients define the right problem, build a working solution, and bring it into their day-to-day operations.

This role combines hands-on software development with discovery, collaboration, and delivery. You should be comfortable learning a new domain, making technical trade-offs, and explaining your decisions clearly.

• Work directly with clients to understand their users, workflows, data, and business goals; translate those needs into clear requirements and technical plans.
• Build and iterate on full-stack applications, APIs, and integrations, moving from a focused prototype to maintainable production software.
• Develop AI features such as RAG, document intelligence, and agentic workflows; evaluate their quality and make their limitations visible.
• Use spec-driven development and AI coding tools thoughtfully, reviewing generated code and keeping architecture, tests, and documentation aligned.
• Deploy and monitor applications in cloud environments, with attention to reliability, security, data access, and operational cost.
• Run demos, gather feedback, troubleshoot issues, and support client teams as they adopt and operate the solution.

• Ability to work across application interfaces, backend services, APIs, databases, and cloud deployment.
• Practical familiarity with LLM applications, prompting, retrieval, or AI integrations, supported by projects you can discuss.
• Strong debugging habits, version control, testing, and a clear approach to handling sensitive client data.
• Clear communication with technical and nontechnical stakeholders, including the ability to explain trade-offs and ask useful questions.
• Ownership of an outcome from initial discovery through implementation, feedback, and improvement.

• Experience with React, FastAPI, Node.js, or Spring Boot.
• Experience with AWS or Azure, containers, CI/CD, and application observability.
• Familiarity with vector search, retrieval evaluation, tool-using agents, or document processing.
• Experience using tools such as Git Hub Copilot, Cursor, or Codex with code review and automated checks.
• Client-facing delivery experience or familiarity with healthcare, finance, accounting, security, or education workflows.