Forward Deployed Engineer - AI
AvePoint · Chicago, IL · 2 wk ago
HybridEngineeringFull-time
About the role
Enterprises are adopting AI faster than they can govern it, and they're looking for a partner who can do two things exceptionally well:
- Speak credibly about AI trust, governance and security.
- Build real AI solutions that solve business problems.
What You'll Do
- Advise on AI Trust & Governance
- Lead AI governance and discovery workshops
- Help customers understand and govern their AI landscape (agents, copilots, models and shadow AI)
- Explain AI governance, security posture and resilience to both technical and executive audiences
- Help establish: AI inventories, Approval workflows, Risk classifications, Audit evidence, Practical AI operating models
- Scope & Shape AI Projects
- Work directly with business stakeholders to understand the real business problem behind AI initiatives
- Identify high-value AI use cases
- Define success criteria
- Translate ambiguous requirements into deliverable technical scopes
- Produce: Architecture outlines, Data & integration requirements, Delivery phases, Effort estimates, Risk assessments
- Write Statements of Work (SoWs) customers can sign and engineering teams can deliver
- Build & Deliver
- Develop both prototypes and production-ready AI solutions including: AI agents, RAG pipelines, LLM integrations: Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Anthropic, MCP-based tool integrations
- Governance and security controls
- Own Customer Delivery
- Remain the trusted technical advisor throughout the engagement by:
- Running enablement sessions
- S supporting customer adoption
- Troubleshooting production issues
- Identifying opportunities to expand engagements where genuine customer value exists
What We're Looking For
- Must-Haves:
- 5+ years in Software Engineering, Solutions Architecture or Technical Consulting.
- 2+ years building modern AI/LLM solutions in production (not just experimentation).
- Hands-on experience with: Azure OpenAIAWS BedrockGoogle Vertex AILangChainSemantic Kernel
- Experience building: RAG solutions, Agentic workflows, Tool/function calling
- Strong programming skills in: PythonC#TypeScript
- Experience with Azure, AWS or GCP, including identity, networking and data services.
- Proven ability to scope technical projects from ambiguous business requirements.
- Excellent communication skills—from board-level conversations through to deep technical discussions.
- Comfortable working autonomously in fast-moving client environments.
- Willingness to travel (~40%).
- Strong Pluses:
- AI Security: Prompt injection, Data leakage, Agent permissions, AI-SPM / DSPM
- Experience with: Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent runtimes, Pinecone, Milvus
- Experience with Enterprise data governance, backup, resilience or Microsoft 365 ecosystems.
- Experience delivering into regulated industries: Public Sector, Defence, Financial Services, Healthcare
- Experience in air-gapped or sovereign cloud environments.
- Previous Forward Deployed Engineering, embedded consulting or customer-facing engineering experience.