Forward Deployed Engineer

Harvest Group is an integrated commerce agency that helps high-growth consumer brands win in today's complex retail landscape. Since 2006, we've partnered with some of the world's most recognized brands to navigate the intersection of in-store and digital commerce, retail media, and social platforms across leading retailers including Walmart, Sam's Club, Target, Amazon, Costco, and Kroger.

What sets Harvest Group apart is our connected approach. By aligning strategy, execution, and insights across every stage of the retail journey- and powering that work through our proprietary technology platform, we help brands create sustainable growth in an increasingly dynamic marketplace.

But our success starts with our people.

At Harvest Group, our culture and values shape how we work, serve our clients, and support one another. We believe in building meaningful relationships, pursuing excellence with humility, and creating an environment where talented individuals can do their best work while continuing to grow professionally and personally.

Our commitment to our people has earned recognition as one of the nation's best workplaces, including:

• Inc. Best Places to Work (2025, 2026)
• Great Place to Work Certified (2024)
• Fortune Best Workplaces for Women (2024)
• Fortune Best Medium Workplaces (2024)
• Fortune Best Consulting & Professional Services Workplaces (2024)
• Business Intelligence Group Best Places to Work (2023)

Our Values

• Integrity - Doing what is right in all things
• Relationship - Pursuing depth, trust, and collaboration
• Service - Laboring for others with humility and care
• Excellence - Delivering extraordinary performance and results with humility
• Journey - Embracing our past and planning for our future with faith

Description

The Forward Deployed Engineer exists to rethink how Harvest Group's Client Services work gets done, using AI to amplify the expertise and experience of the people doing the work. That starts with working alongside the account managers, analysts, and client leads to understand how the work really happens, then asking what those workflows would look like if they were designed with AI from the start.

The role goes deep rather than wide. Starting with one or two high-value processes, the Forward Deployed Engineer finds where friction, gaps, and manual effort slow teams down, designs a better way of working with the people who own each process, and builds and ships the systems behind it, from quick automations to LLM-powered and agentic workflows. They own the path through adoption, drawing on Harvest Group's AI fluency efforts to help teams take up new tools and ways of working.

The Forward Deployed Engineer partners closely with Client Services leadership and with Product and Technology teammates and helps shape the repeatable approaches that future Forward Deployed Engineers will build on.

Our approach to servicing our employees is grounded in our values. To deliver excellence for our Harvest Group employees, we do require that this role is based in Rogers, AR. If you are applying but do not currently reside in Northwest Arkansas, please note that relocation will not be covered by Harvest Group.

Responsibilities

• Embed with Client Services teams to understand their work, tools, and pain points, including the parts of the process nobody has written down.
• Map current-state processes clearly enough that the teams who own them can review, challenge, and improve them.
• Partner with Client Services leaders and end users to design future-state workflows built with AI from the start, focusing on outcomes like time returned, faster turnaround, and fewer errors and handoffs.
• Build and ship AI-enabled solutions on Harvest Group's platforms, including LLM-powered and agentic workflows, integrations, and data pipelines, moving quickly from proof of concept to something teams use every day.
• Partner with Technology teammates to harden, deploy, and support solutions in production, building to Harvest Group's architecture and security standards.
• Make sound decisions on where AI fits and where it doesn't, including build vs. buy, model and tool selection, human review of outputs, cost, and reliability.
• Handle client data responsibly, designing in appropriate privacy, security, and quality checks for AI outputs.
• Drive adoption through training, enablement, and hands-on support during rollout, drawing on Harvest Group's AI fluency efforts and staying with the team until new ways of working stick.
• Help generate technical and process documentation where none exists so solutions can be maintained, reused, and extended by others.
• Define and track success measures for each engagement and communicate results to leadership.
• Codify what works into repeatable discovery and deployment approaches and reusable components that future Forward Deployed Engineers can build on.
• Share field learnings with Product and Technology leadership to inform Harvest Group's broader platform and product direction.

Requirements

• 7+ years building and shipping software in product, solutions engineering, internal tooling, or similar roles focused on solving business problems.
• Hands-on experience shipping LLM-based solutions that people rely on, including prompt and system design, retrieval over structured and unstructured data, agentic workflows, and evaluating output quality.
• Full-stack ability to build working solutions end to end. Experience with React, TypeScript, .NET/C#, Python, and SQL experience is helpful, but not all required.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools as a core part of how you build (Claude Code, Codex, etc.).
• Experience leading discovery with business teams: interviewing users, observing how work really gets done, mapping processes, and running working sessions to design improvements or fully new workflows.
• A track record of taking solutions from prototype to everyday use, with attention to reliability, cost, maintainability, and adoption.
• Sound judgment on where AI creates real value and where it doesn't, with the ability to make the case for what to build, change, or stop.
• Ability to work effectively without direct authority, influencing business leaders and engineers through the quality of your thinking and your follow-through.
• Strong written and verbal communication with both business and technical audiences.
• Work samples to discuss during the interview, such as solutions shipped, processes redesigned, or case studies with measurable results.

Preferred

• Experience in a forward-deployed, solutions engineering, or embedded engineering role.
• Background in agencies, consulting, or other client-services businesses.
• Familiarity with retail, CPG, e-commerce, retail media, digital shelf, or similar integrated commerce domains.
• Experience with MCP, agent frameworks, evaluation tooling, or workflow automation platforms.
• Experience with Microsoft Azure and modern cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery.
• Experience working near production systems, including APIs, source control, CI/CD, and observability.