Forward Deployed Engineer -- Applied AI

Job Description

Job Description

Please click on the link below in order to apply for the position.

HomeSmart is seeking a hands-on applied AI engineer to work directly with internal teams and affiliated businesses. You’ll identify meaningful business problems and build practical solutions—from initial prototype through production and ongoing improvement. Some projects will have a clear scope; others will require you to investigate workflows and define the problem.

This individual-contributor role partners with engineering, data science, and infrastructure teams. We welcome data scientists, applied AI/ML engineers, and full-stack developers with strong engineering skills; prior Forward Deployed Engineer experience is not required.

What You’ll Do

• Work with business teams to understand workflows, identify opportunities, and define success measures.
• Build and deploy production-ready applications, APIs, integrations, AI-enabled workflows, and automation.
• Develop reliable data pipelines and shared data models, including a business data ontology connecting people, activities, documents, and relationships across systems.
• Collaborate on machine learning architecture, training and inference pipelines, testing, and evaluation; troubleshoot issues and improve performance.
• Choose the right approach for each problem—AI/ML, deterministic logic, or conventional software—based on accuracy, latency, cost, and control.
• Build in security, access controls, traceability, error handling, testing, and human review; protect sensitive data and credentials.
• Monitor adoption, quality, time savings, and operating costs, then improve and maintain solutions after launch.

What You’ll Bring

• Experience building software or AI applications, with the ability to explain your contributions and technical tradeoffs.
• Strong Python skills; working knowledge of SQL, APIs, software engineering fundamentals, version control, code review, and testing.
• Experience building with language models and evaluating their capabilities, limitations, and production performance.
• Comfort using AI development tools such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor—and the ability to debug, validate, and improve generated code.
• Sound security judgment around permissions, data integrity, sensitive information, and production credentials.
• Clear communication, curiosity, initiative, and the ability to work through ambiguity with technical and nontechnical partners.

Helpful Experience

Experience with large-scale data systems, cloud infrastructure, deployment automation, machine learning, AI agents, retrieval, document understanding, workflow systems, semantic models, or ontologies is helpful. LangChain, LangGraph, and other orchestration tools are welcome.

You do not need expertise in every area, a specific degree, or a set number of years of experience. We value demonstrated ability, sound judgment, and a willingness to learn. Professional work, independent projects, open source, and self-built products all count.

What to expect in the interview

Be prepared to provide examples of your work such as a GitHub profile, portfolio, or project links. Public code is not required. Please do not share confidential or proprietary information.

Why HomeSmart

Help shape how a real estate business operates. You’ll work closely with users, stakeholders, and experienced technical colleagues, with the opportunity to build solutions that improve individual workflows and become shared capabilities across the organization. Our hybrid approach combines collaboration in Scottsdale with focused engineering time.

HomeSmart is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome qualified applicants from all backgrounds and evaluate candidates based on skills, demonstrated capabilities, and potential. Please let our recruiting team know if you need an accommodation during the hiring process.