Forward Deployed Engineer - Data Engineering & GenAI

Job Title: Forward Deployed Engineer – Data Engineering & GenAI

Location: Washington, DC Metro Area – Hybrid
Local Candidates Only
Duration: 6 Months
Experience: 14+ Years
Work Authorization: US Citizens Only
Interview: Final round – Face-to-Face
Tax Terms: W2 / C2C

Job Description

We are seeking an experienced Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) with strong software engineering, data engineering, Generative AI, and customer-facing experience.

This is not a traditional implementation, solutions consulting, or data engineering role . The ideal candidate will work directly with customers to understand complex and ambiguous operational problems, translate requirements into technical solutions, and personally build and deploy those solutions .

The role sits at the intersection of software engineering, data, APIs, cloud, customers, and Generative AI .

Must-Have Requirements

• 14+ years of professional IT/software engineering experience.
• Strong hands-on software engineering experience.
• Strong data engineering fundamentals, including ETL/ELT, data modeling, schema mapping, and data pipelines.
• Strong Python development skills.
• Experience designing and integrating REST APIs and backend services .
• Hands-on experience building applications using LLMs / Generative AI .
• Experience with one or more of:
  • AI Agents
  • RAG systems
  • Tool/function calling
  • LLM-powered applications
  • AI workflow automation
• Ability to take ambiguous customer requirements and independently turn them into working technical solutions.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills across applications, APIs, infrastructure, and data.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Demonstrated experience working directly with customers and senior stakeholders .
• Ability to work effectively in fast-moving environments with incomplete requirements.
• Must be able to work hybrid in the Washington, DC Metro Area 2–3 days per week and support office/customer-site presence.
• US Citizens Only.

Strongly Preferred

• Previous experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect, Technical Consultant, or customer-facing Software/Data Engineer .
• Federal government, defense, intelligence, national security, or other mission-critical environment experience.
• AWS, Azure, or GCP experience.
• Snowflake, Databricks, Spark, Kafka, Airflow, dbt, or equivalent modern data technologies.
• Vector databases, embeddings, retrieval systems, and modern LLM frameworks.
• Experience deploying AI applications into production.
• Human-in-the-loop workflows and AI evaluation systems.
• Enterprise security, authentication, authorization, and data-governance experience.
• Experience developing reusable technical approaches and influencing engineering/product strategy.

Key Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers to understand business objectives, workflows, technical environments, and pain points.
• Translate ambiguous customer requirements into technical architectures and working solutions.
• Rapidly prototype, build, test, deploy, and iterate on customer-facing solutions.
• Own technical delivery from discovery through implementation and production adoption.
• Design and develop APIs and backend services.
• Integrate applications with databases, APIs, cloud services, AI models, and customer systems.
• Build ETL/ELT pipelines for ingestion, transformation, and delivery.
• Execute bulk data processing using formats such as Parquet, CSV, and JSON .
• Build and maintain REST/API integrations.
• Develop GenAI-powered applications that automate complex customer workflows.
• Build LLM-based agents and agentic workflows across enterprise data, APIs, and tools.
• Develop RAG pipelines connecting LLMs with structured and unstructured enterprise data.
• Implement tool/function calling, structured outputs, workflow orchestration, and multi-step AI systems.
• Build evaluation frameworks and feedback loops to improve AI application quality.
• Apply production engineering practices including testing, version control, CI/CD, monitoring, security, and documentation.

Ideal Candidate

The ideal candidate combines:

Software Engineering + Data Engineering + Python + GenAI/LLMs + APIs + Customer-Facing Delivery

Candidates should be able to move comfortably between a customer conversation, architecture whiteboard, IDE, data pipeline, and production deployment .

Only candidates who meet the core technical requirements and are local to the Washington, DC Metro Area should apply.