Forward Deployed Engineer - Retail & AI Solutions

Job Description

Job Description

Forward Deployed Engineer – Retail AI Solutions

Experience: 6+ years | Location: Onsite at client locations (with travel as required) | Type: Full-time

About the Role Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) are senior engineers who embed directly with our retail clients to scope, build, and ship production software — not demos, not proofs-of-concept. You will sit with the client’s business and technology teams, translate ambiguous business problems into working systems, and own what you build from first deployment through stabilization.
This is a hands-on engineering role with a consultant’s context: you will spend part of your week in discovery conversations with merchandising, store operations, e-commerce, and supply chain stakeholders, and the rest writing production-grade code that solves what you heard. AI is central to how we deliver — you will build LLM-powered features and agentic workflows, and you will use AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code as a core part of your daily engineering practice.
This is not a pre-sales or demo role. There is no sales quota. Success is measured by working software in the client’s production environment and the business outcomes it drives. What You Will Do

• Discover and scope: Embed with retail client teams to understand the real business problem beneath the stated ask — across areas such as e-commerce, POS, order management, inventory, pricing/promotions, and supply chain — and define solutions where no spec exists.
• Build production software: Design and ship full-stack applications and services (Angular front ends, Node.js/TypeScript back ends, REST/GraphQL APIs) inside or integrated with the client’s environment.
• Engineer AI solutions: Build LLM-powered features — retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic workflows, tool/function calling, prompt pipelines — and take them from prototype to production with proper evaluation, guardrails, and monitoring.
• Work AI-natively: Use Claude Code and similar AI-assisted development tools to compress delivery timelines, and help client engineering teams adopt these practices effectively and safely.
• Integrate with enterprise systems: Connect to the client’s existing landscape — commerce platforms, ERP/OMS/WMS, POS, data warehouses, identity/SSO — and navigate security, compliance, and change-management processes.
• Own what you ship: Handle deployment, monitoring, incident response, and iteration after go-live; stabilize and improve rather than hand off and leave.
• Close the loop: Feed field learnings back into our delivery playbooks, reusable assets, and product/solution roadmap.

Must-Have Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping and operating production systems end-to-end (not only feature work within a large team).
• Strong full-stack skills: Angular (or a comparable modern SPA framework with willingness to work in Angular) and Node.js/TypeScript, plus solid fundamentals in API design, SQL/NoSQL data modeling, and testing.
• Hands-on AI engineering experience: you have built and shipped at least one real LLM-powered application or workflow (RAG, agents, tool calling, prompt engineering, evals) — beyond tutorials or personal experiments.
• Working fluency with AI-assisted development — Claude Code, or equivalent agentic coding tools — and sound judgment about where they accelerate work and where they need human review.
• Retail domain exposure: you have delivered software for retail or consumer commerce businesses and can speak the language of at least one area — e-commerce, stores/POS, order management, inventory, pricing, or supply chain.
• Client-facing strength: experience working directly with business stakeholders, comfort presenting and defending technical decisions, and the ability to operate with incomplete information.
• Cloud deployment experience on AWS, Azure, or GCP, including CI/CD and basic observability.
• Willingness to work onsite at client locations, with travel as required by the engagement.

Nice to Have

• Experience with the Anthropic API / Claude models, MCP (Model Context Protocol), or agent frameworks such as LangGraph or the Claude Agent SDK.
• Python for data and AI workloads; exposure to data platforms (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks) and pipeline tooling.
• Direct experience with retail platforms and systems — e.g., commerce platforms (Salesforce Commerce, Shopify, commercetools), SAP or other ERPs, OMS/WMS, or POS systems.
• Prior consulting, professional services, or startup experience where you owned outcomes rather than tickets.
• Experience mentoring engineers or leading small delivery pods.

Who Thrives in This Role FDEs are generalists with depth: engineers who are energized by ambiguity, get satisfaction from seeing their software used by real businesses within weeks, and are comfortable being the technical face of the company at a client site. If you prefer a fixed backlog, a single codebase, and minimal stakeholder contact, this role is probably not the right fit — and that’s okay. Why VirtuosicTechnologies

• Work at the intersection of retail and applied AI, on problems where your code visibly moves business metrics.
• An AI-native engineering culture: Claude Code and agentic tooling are part of how we build, not an afterthought.
• High ownership and fast feedback loops — you scope it, you build it, you run it.
• A pathway to senior client-facing technical leadership (Principal FDE / Engagement Architect).