Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (AI Agents & Automation)

Location: Either New York City or San Francisco

MBN Solutions is partnering with a highly capitalized software investment platform that is redefining how private equity firms create value through AI and automation.

Backed by over $550M in funding from leading investors including General Catalyst, Lightspeed, D1 Capital and prominent technology founders, our client is building an AI-native operating system designed to transform how software businesses are acquired, operated, and scaled.

They are now seeking an exceptional Forward Deployed Engineer to sit at the intersection of software engineering, AI systems, and business operations.

The Opportunity

This is not a traditional software engineering position.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will work directly with portfolio company leadership teams, embedding yourself within their operations to identify high-impact opportunities where AI and agentic workflows can materially improve business performance.

You’ll partner with General Managers, Operations Leaders, Customer Success teams and executives to understand where time, revenue, and efficiency are being lost—and then build software solutions that solve those problems.

Think Palantir-style Forward Deployed Engineering, applied to modern AI systems and private equity value creation.

Rather than building products in isolation, you’ll deploy production-grade AI systems that directly influence customer retention, revenue growth, operational efficiency, support automation, pricing optimization, and business intelligence.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Embedding with portfolio companies to understand operational challenges firsthand
• Identifying high-leverage workflows where AI can create measurable business impact
• Designing and deploying agentic systems, workflows, and automation solutions
• Building integrations across internal and external software platforms
• Developing full-stack solutions using modern engineering practices
• Creating evaluation frameworks and feedback loops for AI-driven systems
• Monitoring, iterating, and optimizing deployed solutions based on real-world outcomes
• Translating successful deployments into repeatable playbooks that can be rolled out across multiple portfolio companies
• Acting as the technical partner and trusted advisor to business leaders and stakeholders

What We’re Looking For

Core Engineering Experience

• Strong full-stack engineering capabilities
• Commercial experience with Python and/or TypeScript
• Experience building frontend applications using React
• Strong SQL and data engineering fundamentals
• Ability to quickly navigate unfamiliar codebases and ship production solutions

AI & Machine Learning

• Experience building and deploying applications powered by LLMs
• Understanding of agentic architectures and autonomous workflows
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks and testing AI outputs
• Knowledge of prompt engineering, orchestration frameworks, and production AI systems
• Ability to balance automation with appropriate human oversight

Business & Communication

• Strong stakeholder management skills
• Comfortable working directly with executives and operational leaders
• Ability to translate business problems into technical solutions
• Strong written communication and documentation skills
• Commercial awareness and an understanding of business performance metrics

Ideal Background

We are particularly interested in candidates who have experience in:

• Forward Deployed Engineering
• Solutions Engineering
• Technical Consulting
• Product Engineering
• AI Platform Engineering
• Applied AI / Agentic Systems Development

Additional experience within private equity, consulting, M&A integration, operational transformation, or SaaS businesses would be highly advantageous.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Snowflake, Databricks, or modern data platforms
• Exposure to Apache Iceberg or open table formats
• Experience building production-grade AI agents
• Understanding of autonomy controls, evaluation systems, and outcome tracking
• Previous work within portfolio operations environments

Why Join?

This is an opportunity to work on some of the most commercially impactful AI problems being solved today.

You’ll have direct exposure to executives, portfolio companies, and AI systems operating in production environments where success is measured by real business outcomes—not research papers or proof-of-concepts.