Forward Deployed Engineer- Operations

We have an exciting opportunity at Seaboard Foods as a Forward Deployed Engineer – Live Operations to support our Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) and Live Operations teams in our Merriam, KS office. The role is a hands‑on builder focused on owning, maintaining, and improving the Foundry applications that support critical business operations. Your primary responsibility is to ensure Live Operations and RNG applications are reliable, accurate, and deliver value to the business.

This includes troubleshooting issues, improving existing workflows, maintaining data models and ontology structures, and supporting users across operational teams.

Working directly with business leaders and end users, you will identify opportunities to eliminate manual processes, automate repetitive work, and develop solutions that improve operational performance. You will build applications, workflows, dashboards, and AI‑enabled tools that help teams make better decisions and execute more efficiently.

The role is embedded within Live Production, Renewable Natural Gas, Transportation, Feed Milling, and other operational functions, providing broad exposure to the business and opportunities to drive meaningful impact.

At Seaboard Foods, we create the most sought‑after pork. As one of the nation’s leading pork producers and exporters, we are committed to producing high‑quality food responsibly while connecting every step from our farms to family tables. More than 5,400 employees across five states support our farms, feed mills, and processing operations, helping deliver Prairie Fresh pork to customers in more than 30 countries worldwide.

At Seaboard Foods, we value teamwork, integrity, safety, and continuous improvement. As a Fortune 500 employer and recent Business Journal “Best Places to Work” nominee, we are proud to foster a culture where employees can grow, contribute, and make a meaningful impact.

• Support and update existing Foundry applications across the entire Live/RNG business; these mission‑critical applications are less than one year old and need continuous improvement.
• Build and develop new applications to continue to drive the business forward.
• Surface high‑leverage manual workflows and retire them with shipped software, delivering AI‑assisted applications from prototypes to production in days rather than quarters.
• Demonstrate, every sprint, the non‑negotiable expectation of this seat: builder by blood. This role writes code (with AI‑assisted development), runs evaluations, and pushes to production. It does not delegate the build.

• Mentor citizen developers and adjacent technical staff at Seaboard Foods on agentic and AI‑assisted development practices.
• Present progress, results, and forward‑looking plans to Seaboard Foods leadership on a recurring cadence, including quantified savings estimates, adoption metrics, and risks.
• Run trainings and workshops for internal teams as new initiatives are built and deployed, so the people closest to the work can operate and extend what ships.
• Stay current with emerging trends in agentic AI, ontology engineering, and AI‑assisted software delivery, and assess their applicability to Seaboard Foods.
• Build relationships with technology vendors, partners, and research communities to maintain a pipeline of innovative solutions.
• Perform additional duties as assigned.

• Expert knowledge of Foundry and AIP (ontology, AIP Logic, Workshop, Pipeline Builder), or equivalent enterprise data and ontology platform experience with a clear ability to ramp quickly.
• Five (5) or more years of progressive experience shipping production software, with a recent and verifiable portfolio (repositories, deployed applications, agents in production).
• Hands‑on experience building, evaluating, and deploying LLM‑powered agents, including tool use, retrieval, and multi‑step planning. A clear point of view on what rigorous agent evaluation actually looks like.
• Strong fluency in Python and Type Script. Working command of at least one modern agent framework and one evaluation framework.
• Disciplined cost and latency instincts for LLM systems,…