Forward Deployed Engineer-Innovation

Opportunity

We have an exciting Forward Deployed Engineer‑Innovation opportunity within our Innovation team in Merriam, KS. In this role, you will partner across business functions to identify opportunities to automate manual processes, build and deploy AI‑powered solutions, and improve operational efficiency. You will play a key role in developing and maintaining internal tools—including agent‑based systems and applications—while supporting process optimization, cross‑functional collaboration, and the advancement of our innovation capabilities.

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.

This list is not intended to be all‑inclusive, and other duties may be assigned.

• Build, evaluate, and deploy production agentic workflows end‑to‑end. That includes scoping problems with business units, selecting models and tools, designing harnesses, deploying into operations, and instrumenting for post‑deploy observability. Stand up reproducible evaluation pipelines so agent quality is measured rather than asserted.
• Model and extend the ontology in Foundry and AIP. This covers the objects, links, actions, and write‑back paths that power agents, AIP Logic workflows, and internally built applications. Translate domain processes across Live Production, Plant Operations, Supply Chain, Pricing, Sales and Scheduling, MICS, and HR into ontology primitives, and enforce hygiene (naming, lineage, permissions, deprecation) as surface area scales.
• Surface high‑leverage manual workflows and retire them with shipped software, delivering AI‑assisted applications from prototypes to production in days rather than quarters.
• Operate and extend the Innovation team’s Open Claw agent harness as the primary agent runtime. Responsibilities include prompt and context plumbing, tool registration, guardrails, and routing. Manage tokenomics by budgeting, monitoring, and optimizing token spend per workflow, and enforce cost SLOs across deployed agents. Curate the supporting Hermes and Obsidian knowledge substrate, including ingestion, indexing, freshness, and access control.
• Be a part of the Innovation team’s R&D arsenal. Continuously scout, benchmark, and prototype against the frontier of model families, agent frameworks, evaluation tooling, and AI‑assisted development environments. Publish short, decision‑grade internal write‑ups. Convert validated bets into roadmap items and kill the rest quickly.
• 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.

• Partner with IT, security, and compliance to land deployments inside the controls expected of a publicly traded enterprise, without sacrificing iteration speed.
• 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…