Forward Deployed Engineer - Build AI That Actually Ships - $180K Base, $400K+ OTE
Every Fortune 500 company is now asking the same question - what does it mean to run this business if AI does half the work in five years. Most don't have an answer. Most are stuck with agencies who show up, build a demo, present a nice deck, and disappear before anything actually ships.
I'm working with a fast-growing AI transformation company that operates completely differently. They're a preferred partner of one of the frontier AI labs 🤝, sitting in the room with that lab's own applied AI teams on real client work, and they're seeing several new enterprise deals land every single day off the back of that relationship. Their engineers don't hand off to someone else once the plan is agreed - they embed directly inside the client's codebase, own the architecture, and stay until the workflow is genuinely running in production with nobody from the company in the room.
This is a Forward Deployed Engineer role. A flavour of what you'd actually be doing:
- Dropped into unfamiliar codebases, sometimes fifteen-year-old legacy systems, sometimes greenfield builds, and expected to get productive fast
- Using every agentic coding tool available to you to move quickly
- Roughly 60% greenfield work, 40% building on existing infrastructure
- Owning features end to end - architecture, implementation, deployment, and the relationship with the client engineer reviewing your PR
- Occasional client site visits rather than living out of a suitcase
On comp, it's built to reward output rather than time served:
- $180K guaranteed base
- Uncapped quarterly bonus tied directly to what you ship - typical performers add $20-30K a quarter once ramped in, so realistic OTE lands around $260-300K+
- Top performers are seeing $50-60K+ a quarter on top of base, pushing total comp well over $400K
- Usually takes 1-2 months to start seeing meaningful bonus once you're up and running
What you'll need - full cloud experience (AWS, GCP, or Azure) is essential, and you'll need to be comfortable owning a client relationship yourself rather than handing that off to someone else on the team.
If that sounds like the kind of environment you'd thrive in, drop me a message and I'll talk you through the details.
