Principal Forward Deployed Engineer - AI

Job Description

Principal Forward Deployed Engineer – AI

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New York, NY - hybrid, 3 days per week onsite

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$230,000 - $250,000 base salary + annual bonus + RSUs

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THE COMPANY

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Harnham is partnering with a leading global technology business focused on delivering enterprise-grade AI solutions to professional services and large-scale organizations. The company is investing heavily in the next generation of generative AI platforms and is expanding a highly strategic engineering team responsible for deploying cutting-edge AI solutions into complex customer environments.

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This is an opportunity to operate at Principal level, combining architecture, hands-on engineering, customer engagement, and technical leadership while helping shape the future direction of an industry-leading AI platform.

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RESPONSIBILITIES

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• Lead enterprise AI engagements from discovery and solution design through production deployment.
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• Architect, build, review, and optimize large-scale AI and distributed systems in customer-facing environments.
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• Partner with Product and Engineering teams to convert customer requirements into scalable, reusable platform capabilities.
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• Define technical standards across AI architecture, cloud infrastructure, integrations, security, reliability, and operational excellence.
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• Develop repeatable frameworks, deployment patterns, and best practices that can be adopted across multiple customer implementations.
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• Communicate technical strategy, architectural trade-offs, and business impact to both technical teams and executive stakeholders.
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• Mentor senior engineers and contribute to broader engineering strategy and innovation initiatives.
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SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

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Required

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• 12+ years of software engineering, architecture, or technical leadership experience.
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• Demonstrated experience building and deploying production AI/ML systems at enterprise scale.
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• Strong expertise in Generative AI and LLM-powered applications.
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• Deep knowledge of distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and enterprise integrations.
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• Hands-on software engineering capability with recent coding and code review experience.
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• Experience delivering secure, reliable, scalable systems in production environments.
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• Strong customer-facing communication skills with experience influencing executive stakeholders.
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Preferred

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• Experience with agentic AI systems and autonomous workflows.
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• Knowledge of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures.
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• Familiarity with AI evaluation frameworks and model performance measurement.
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• Background in forward-deployed engineering or customer-embedded delivery teams.
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• Experience operating within regulated industries.
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• Expertise in AI governance, privacy, security, and compliance.
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• Open-source contributions, patents, publications, or conference speaking experience.
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BENEFITS

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• Highly competitive compensation package.
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• Annual performance bonus.
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• Equity participation.
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• Opportunity to influence product strategy and enterprise AI innovation.
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• Exposure to high-profile customer engagements and complex technical challenges.
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• Collaborative, high-caliber engineering environment with significant ownership and impact.
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HOW TO APPLY

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Please register your interest by sending your CV via the Apply link on this page.

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KEY TERMS

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Principal Engineer | Principal Software Engineer | AI Architect | Generative AI | LLM | Large Language Models | Enterprise AI | Machine Learning | Distributed Systems | Cloud Architecture | RAG | Agentic AI | Forward Deployed Engineering | Technical Leadership | Customer-Facing Engineering | Enterprise Software | Platform Engineering | Solutions Architecture | Production AI Systems | Hybrid New York Jobs | Forward Deployed Engineer | FDE