Principal Forward Deployed Engineer - AI

Principal Forward Deployed Engineer – AI

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

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

THE COMPANY

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.

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.

RESPONSIBILITIES

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

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Required

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

Preferred

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

BENEFITS

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

HOW TO APPLY

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

KEY TERMS

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