Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer

New York, New York, United States

We are building the FDE function at Diligent from the ground up with ambitions to grow this team to 20–25 people. The first three hires will shape how we embed AI agents into some of the world's most complex governance, risk and compliance environments. This is not a support or consultancy role. It is a builder role, for someone who is equally comfortable reading a failing agent trace, running a discovery workshop with a bank's internal audit team, and translating what they find into a production-grade agentic solution.

You will be building AI agents for GRC professionals, not assistants that surface suggestions, but agents that own complex, multi-step workflows end to end. Agents that customers can hand a task to and trust it will come back done. Closing the gap between a promising prototype and something a company Board and ELT depends on is a completely different discipline to building the prototype. That is what this role is about.

Here's a breakdown of what you'll do:

• Embed directly with major enterprise customers (global banks, regulated corporates) across EU and US, sitting with internal audit teams, risk functions, compliance and governance professionals to understand their real workflows, not to demo what the agents already do.
• Run agent-focused discovery workshops, rapidly prototype agentic solutions, and test them with practitioners; distinguishing between workflows that need an agent and those that need a button.
• Source, integrate, and move data between enterprise systems as part of live customer implementations — understanding the real data landscape customers operate in and building reliable pipelines to support it.
• Take agents from prototype through to production-grade reliability: building evaluation infrastructure, golden datasets, guardrails, and observability so a compliance team can trust the output.
• Master the hard failure modes of agentic AI — silent regressions on model updates, context window degradation, prompt instability, non-deterministic outputs — and build the infrastructure that prevents them.
• Synthesise learning across multiple enterprise accounts to identify which agent behaviours should be generalised into the platform, feeding field insights back to product and engineering.
• Translate what customers actually need into concrete API surfaces, data integration requirements, and agent tool specifications for internal teams.

These are the essentials you'll need to get an interview:

• Hands-on experience shipping at least one SaaS production agent from prototype to evaluation to live deployment to regression — and the scars to prove it.
• Proven implementation experience: you have worked on enterprise deployments where you have sourced data from multiple systems, built integrations, and onboarded complex customers onto technical platforms. This is a hard requirement.
• Deep understanding of the Agent Development Life Cycle: evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, prompt versioning, and golden datasets.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: APIs, data pipelines, backend services, agent tool-calling frameworks (MCP or equivalent). TypeScript and/or Python.
• Experience with multi-agent orchestration patterns: orchestrator/sub-agent architectures, agent-to-agent coordination, shared context models.
• Genuine comfort operating across both technical and business environments — as effective with a company Board and ELT as you are debugging a failing agent trace.
• Curiosity about GRC, audit, and compliance domains. You don't need a compliance background, but you need the drive to learn it fast.
• Flexibility to travel regularly across EU and US customer sites.

It would be great if you had these too:

• A background in Professional Services, Solutions Engineering, Customer Success, or a forward-deployed technical role — people who have lived in the space between customer requirements and technical delivery are often a natural fit for this work.
• Familiarity with GRC, audit, or compliance software platforms.
• Exposure to LLMOps tooling: tracing, prompt versioning, evaluation at scale, regression testing frameworks.
• Prior experience in forward-deployed, solutions engineering, or embedded customer-facing engineering roles.

U.S pay range

$130,000 - $170,000 USD

About Us

Diligent is the AI leader in governance, risk and compliance (GRC) SaaS solutions, helping more than 1 million users and 700,000 board members to clarify risk and elevate governance. The Diligent One Platform gives practitioners, the C-Suite and the board a consolidated view of their entire GRC practice so they can more effectively manage risk, build greater resilience and make better decisions, faster.

At Diligent, we're building the future with people who think boldly and move fast. Whether you're designing systems that leverage large language models or part of a team reimaging workflows with AI, you'll help us unlock entirely new ways of working and thinking. Curiosity is in our DNA, we look for individuals willing to ask the big questions and experiment fearlessly - those who embrace change not as a challenge, but as an opportunity. The future belongs to those who keep learning, and we are building it together. At Diligent, you're not just building the future - you're an agent of positive change, joining a global community on a mission to make an impact.

What Diligent Offers You

• Creativity is ingrained in our culture. We are innovative collaborators by nature. We thrive in exploring how things can be differently both in our internal processes and to help our clients
• We care about our people. Diligent offers a flexible work environment, global days of service, comprehensive health benefits, meeting free days, generous time off policy and wellness programs to name a few
• We have teams all over the world. We may be headquartered in New York City, but we have office hubs in Washington D.C., Vancouver, London, Galway, Budapest, Munich, Bengaluru, Singapore, and Sydney.
• Diversity is important to us. Growing, maintaining and promoting a diverse team is a top priority for us. We foster and encourage diversity through our Employee Resource Groups and provide access to resources and education to support the education of our team, facilitate dialogue, and foster understanding.

Diligent created the modern governance movement. Our world-changing idea is to empower leaders with the technology, insights and connections they need to drive greater impact and accountability – to lead with purpose. Our employees are passionate, smart, and creative people who not only want to help build the software company of the future, but who want to make the world a more sustainable, equitable and better place.

Headquartered in New York, Diligent has offices in Washington D.C., London, Galway, Budapest, Vancouver, Bengaluru, Munich, Singapore and Sydney. To foster strong collaboration and connection, this role will follow a hybrid work model. If you are within a commuting distance to one of our Diligent office locations, you will be expected to work onsite at least 50% of the time. We believe that in-person engagement helps drive innovation, teamwork, and a strong sense of community.

We are a drug free workplace. Diligent is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religious creed, sex, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, pregnancy, childbirth, physical disability, mental disability, age, military status, protected veteran status, marital status, registered domestic partner or civil union status, gender (including sex stereotyping and gender identity or expression), medical condition (including, but not limited to, cancer related or HIV/AIDS related), genetic information, or sexual orientation in accordance with applicable federal, state and local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. See also Diligent's EEO Policy and Know Your Rights. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at View email address on click.appcast.io.

At Diligent, we recognize the value of a diverse global workforce. Visa sponsorship may be available for select positions based on business needs and specific role requirements. Sponsorship decisions are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and eligibility should not be assumed for all opportunities.

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