Principal Forward Deployed AI Engineer

When you join VerizonYou want more out of a career. A place to share your ideas freely — even if they’re daring or different. Where the true you can learn, grow, and thrive. At Verizon, we power and empower how people live, work and play by connecting them to what brings them joy. We do what we love — driving innovation, creativity, and impact in the world. Our V Team is a community of people who anticipate, lead, and believe that listening is where learning begins. In crisis and in celebration, we come together — lifting our communities and building trust in how we show up, everywhere & always. Want in? Join the #VTeamLife.What you’ll be doing…As a Principal Forward Deployed AI Engineer within Verizon’s Transformation Command Center (TCC), you will embed directly into the frontline of Verizon’s core Business Units to solve our most critical, ambiguous, and high-stakes operational challenges. Operating with total technical ownership, you will architect, build, and deploy production-grade agentic systems, enterprise RAG engines, full-stack microservices, and decision systems into live operations.You are a technical anchor: you pair deep systems craftsmanship with a product mindset, cutting through operational ambiguity to design production architectures, implement custom orchestration layers (via LangGraph, Temporal, or custom state machines), and enforce context management strategies that scale into enterprise assets. Beyond shipping point solutions, you will run workloads reliably on Domino, Airflow, and Kubernetes, abstracting bespoke code into reusable SDKs, shared libraries, and architectural playbooks that scale company-wide.Responsibilities include: End-to-End Architectural Blueprinting: Define the full-stack architecture for embedded AI initiatives, including multi-agent orchestration, state machines, latency/cost budgets, security boundaries, and enterprise back-end integrations.Agentic Orchestration Engineering, Workflow Automation and Governance: Architect stateful agent workflows complying with established agentic governance rules, using tools like LangGraph, Temporal, or event-driven state machines, establishing strict protocols for tool calling, execution sandboxing, and deterministic fallback logic.Context & Retrieval Systems: Design production RAG infrastructure incorporating hybrid search, re-ranking algorithms, metadata filtering, and semantic caching, directly informing and scaling Verizon’s context architecture.Runtime & Cloud Deployment: Deploy production agent services and scheduled workflows to target runtimes (e.g., Domino Data Lab, Apache Airflow, Kubernetes microservices, and serverless compute across AWS, GCP, or Azure).Evaluation Harness Design: Architect offline and online evaluation frameworks (e.g., LLM-as-a-judge, synthetic test generation, human-in-the-loop review queues, live A/B rollouts) to measure model drift, context hallucination rates, and task completion metrics.Platform Codification & IP Creation: Generalize custom domain deployments into reusable internal SDKs, API primitives, and modular UI components; mentor engineers across the organization and draft technical documentation for Verizon patent disclosures.Strategic Discovery & Scoping: Embed alongside BU leadership to map intricate operational processes, cut through organizational noise, and isolate the highest-leverage intervention points where applied AI delivers measurable uplift.Executive Translation: Serve as the technical authority in the room with BU Vice Presidents and Managing Directors, demystifying algorithmic behaviors, failure modes, and performance trade-offs.What we’re looking for…You'll need to have:Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field or four or more years of work experience.Six or more years of relevant experience required, demonstrated through one or a combination of work and/or military experience, or specialized training.Extensive hands-on experience leveraging frontier LLMs (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Google Gemini) and agentic developer frameworks (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) to build scalable solutions and achieve core business milestones.Four or more years of shipping production software and/or demonstrated experience deploying LLM applications, agentic workflows, or autonomous tool-calling pipelines into production.Demonstrated proficiency in Python and modern TypeScript/Node.js for full-stack API integration and backend orchestration.Proven track record implementing both offline evaluation benchmarks and online evaluation/observability pipelines (latency, token costs, hallucination tracking, eval-driven development).Advanced full-stack programming experience in Python, SQL, and modern JavaScript/TypeScript stacks.Proven track record designing offline/online eval harnesses, guardrail frameworks, and observability systems (latency, token optimization, tracing).Demonstrated ability to independently scope ambiguous technical initiatives and present architectural designs to senior executive stakeholders.Demonstrated ability to interface directly with enterprise stakeholders, translate ambiguous business requirements into technical architectures, and lead project delivery end-to-end.Even better if you have one or more of the following:Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related technical field.Experience building and scaling centralized context platforms or enterprise search engines similar to Verizon’s internal enterprise context layer platforms.Prior forward-deployed engineering, solutions architecture, or technical consulting experience in top-tier technology firms or hyperscalers.Record of turning one-off operational builds into enterprise-wide shared libraries, with associated technical publications or filed patents.Domain knowledge in telecommunications, network capacity optimization, capital planning, or large-scale customer care operations.Deep expertise in retrieval and context architectures: designing production RAG pipelines, vector databases (e.g., pgvector, Milvus, Pinecone), hybrid search (dense + sparse/lexical), and dynamic context management.Proven experience deploying containerized services and data workflows across enterprise platforms such as Domino Data Lab, Apache Airflow, Kubernetes (EKS/GKE), and hyperscaler cloud environments (AWS/GCP/Azure).Experience with containerized deployments (Docker), API design, and cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure).If Verizon and this role sound like a fit for you, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every “even better” qualification listed above.Where you’ll be workingIn this hybrid role, you'll have a defined work location that includes working from home and a minimum of three days per week in the office, which will be set by your manager. Employees are responsible for maintaining compliance with hybrid work policies.Scheduled Weekly Hours40Equal Employment OpportunityVerizon is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to veteran status, disability or other legally protected characteristics.Benefits and CompensationOur benefits are designed to help you move forward in your career, and in areas of your life outside of Verizon. From health and wellness benefit options including: medical, dental, vision, short and long term disability, basic life insurance, supplemental life insurance, AD&D insurance, identity theft protection, pet insurance and group home & auto insurance. We also offer a matched 401(k) savings plan, up to 8 company paid holidays per year and up to 6 personal days per year, paid parental leave, adoption assistance and tuition assistance, plus other incentives, we’ve got you covered with our award-winning total rewards package. Depending on the role, employees have the opportunity to receive compensation in the form of premium pay such as overtime, shift differential, holiday pay, allowances, etc. Newly hired employees receive up to 15 days of vacation per year, which grows with additional service. For part-timers, your coverage will vary as you may be eligible for some of these benefits depending on your individual circumstances.The salary will vary depending on your location and confirmed job-related skills and experience. This is an incentive based position with the potential to earn more. For part-time roles, your compensation will be adjusted to reflect your hours.The salary range for the location(s) listed on this job requisition based on a full-time schedule is: $120,500.00 - $231,000.00.SummaryLocation: Basking Ridge, New Jersey; Alpharetta, Georgia; Irving, TexasType: Full time