Forward Deployed AI Engineer

$70 - $85 per hour | Exeter, RI | Remote | Consulting

Remote contract-to-hire that converts to $225K. Put production agentic AI into a mission-driven health plan, own the platform from day one, and help a team grow from 50 to 150 engineers. Your first-week onsite costs are covered.

We are a national, AI-first technology solutions provider. We help enterprise and public-sector organizations modernize how their people work, through AI, cloud, collaboration and managed services. We’ve been nationally recognized as a best place to work for career growth. We embed senior engineers inside our clients’ teams to turn AI strategy into production systems that last. Our current engagement is with a regional, not-for-profit health plan that has already shipped AI to production on its own and is now in sourcing engineering as a deliberate strategy, growing its team from about 50 to 150.

As a Forward Deployed AI Engineer, you will stand up the plan’s enterprise AI platform, build the guardrails and reference patterns everything else is built on, and then go deep on workflows where success is measured in members served.

• Contract-to-hire, converting to a full-time role with us at a $225,000 base salary
• Fully remote after an expense-paid first week onsite
• Ground-floor ownership: you build the eval framework, the guardrails and the orchestration patterns
• Real production problems in prior authorization, appeals and member services, not demos
• An employer recognized nationally for career growth
• Full benefits package upon conversion

This isn’t a seat where you build demos for a slide deck. We are looking for a backend/platform engineer who has personally taken LLM-backed or agentic workflows past proof of concept into production, and owned them afterward through evals, guardrails, cost control and observability. You’ll be embedded with the engineering team of a regional health plan in a PHI-everywhere environment. You will run discovery with business stakeholders and pair hands-on with engineers to deliver.

The ideal candidate is equally comfortable defining the right problem with a non-technical business owner and writing the code to solve it. Just as important, they know when a problem doesn’t need AI s client describes itself as a “Toyota Camry shop”: reliable, maintainable and simple beats sophisticated. The team will also be heavily involved in designing and building a Care Management System, where compliance with NCQA standards is critical.

This role is remote, with minimal travel to Providence, RI, and requires onsite attendance the full week of 11/9.

• Stand up Claude Code and Azure AI Foundry for a 20-seat developer pilot, including Entra authentication, quota management and cost controls.
• Build guardrails, secure design patterns and reference implementations that the client’s engineering teams build on.
• Author and secure MCP servers and tool integrations connecting agents to Service Now, Snowflake, Grafana/Open Telemetry, Entra and healthcare data systems.
• Build the AI eval and test harness covering prompts, retrieval, tool calls, permissions and end-to-end workflows.
• Design and deliver multi-step and agentic workflows for appeals and grievances, prior authorization and member services. Pick the right shape for each: deterministic workflow, single agent or multi-agent.
• Build RAG pipelines over the policy corpus with access controls, hybrid retrieval, citations and grounding checks.
• Implement policy-as-code and automated audit evidence for an organization audited seven times a year.
• Lead discovery sessions with business owners, document current-state workflows, and translate needs into requirements, user…