Forward Deployed Engineer – Implementation Technical Lead

The Role

You are an embedded builder who bridges frontier AI products and production‑grade reality inside our clients' operations. After our Fusion Discovery practice ships the prioritized roadmap, you are the named technical principal who turns that roadmap into running software—code, deploy, integrate, ship—inside the client's Azure subscription, against their data, under their compliance constraints, on the calendar they signed up for.

You are the FDE in the literal sense the term means in 2026: an embedded operator with a founder's mindset who owns outcomes end to end. Discovery hands you a scoped milestone roadmap and a Statement of Work. You take it from there. You can expect to travel up to 30% of the time with this position.

The FDE market is hot in 2026 and the role definition varies wildly across companies. PTM's flavor is specific, and we are explicit about it.

• Write production code that ships into the client's runtime.
• Build agentic systems with PydanticAI.
• Stand up event‑driven ETL on Azure Container App Jobs.
• Scaffold lovable.dev → Static Web App frontends backed by FastAPI or ASP.NET Core BFFs (Backends‑for‑Frontends).
• Provision the whole stack with Bicep + azd.
• Wire structured logging, LLM cost telemetry and the auth gateway from commit #1.
• Own the engagement's technical outcome.

• Run discovery interviews, facilitate executive prioritization workshops, or produce the Solution Architecture Document. Our Fusion Discovery practice does that upstream and hands you their output.
• Carry the customer‑facing volume; you handle the technical volume while the Discovery team handles engagement coordination.

In your first twelve months, you will serve as the technical lead on three to five Fusion Development engagements. Each one ships:

• A working production deployment in the client's Azure subscription, deployed via azd up and reproducible on demand.
• Vertical slices of demonstrable client value delivered against the milestone roadmap from Discovery.
• At least one KPI moved, with structured telemetry to prove it.
• A clean handoff document for ongoing operations: runbooks, infrastructure contracts, and the digital twin of the decisions made along the way.

Approximate time split: ~45% writing code, ~30% integration, infrastructure, and observability plumbing, ~15% client technical touchpoints (architecture standups, demo days, escalations), ~10% specifications, interface contracts, and engagement reflections. The customer‑facing volume is lower than Big Lab FDE pool roles because PTM's Discovery practice carries the customer‑facing volume upstream.

• Convert the Discovery roadmap into an executable engineering plan with swimlanes, interface contracts, and validator‑first todo list.
• Scaffold the first commit as a working local full stack—frontend, backend, database, auth gateway, observability, IaC (Infrastructure as Code)—bootable with one command on a fresh clone.
• Implement Python services (FastAPI BFFs, event‑driven ETL on Azure Container App Jobs, PydanticAI agentic systems) under our RPIR validator‑first loop:
  Research, Plan, Implement validators RED, implement production code GREEN, Review.
• Build ASP.NET Core BFFs when the client's existing investment or team strength requires it. Use .NET Aspire App Host for local orchestration when there are three or more services or any polyglot mix.
• Wire frontends scaffolded via lovable.dev into your BFF, hosted on Azure Static Web Apps.
• Stand up the Azure footprint with Bicep + azd: subscription‑level deployments, module contracts, mandatory tagging, Key Vault‑backed configuration, and what‑if gates on every pull request.
• Instrument structured logging from commit #1 (structlog with callsite metadata), wire OTEL (Open Telemetry) to the Aspire dev dashboard locally and to Azure Monitor in production, and emit LLM cost telemetry for every model call.
• Stand up the auth gateway:
  Traefik with Forward Auth in containers, Microsoft Entra  default, with Auth0, Okta, Google Workspace OIDC, AWS Cognito, or generic OIDC as first‑class alternates when the client's identity posture…