Lead Forward Deployed Engineer, Palantir
Deloitte · Baltimore, MD · 3 days ago
HybridEngineering$189k–$373k/yrFull-time
About the role
Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) at Deloitte help clients transform AI ambition into enterprise-scale impact by pairing leading-class engineering with pod-based delivery and vertical expertise. This role positions you at the forefront of AI transformations.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the senior practitioner-leader embedded directly with strategic clients, leading forward-deployed engineering pods that develop and deploy GenAI solutions into production.
- Set technical direction, remove delivery blockers, and stay hands-on in designing, reviewing, and debugging systems with the team.
- Translate engineering trade-offs into clear decisions for client leaders when needed, influencing decisions at the C-suite level while maintaining technical credibility.
- Lead executive-level discovery, define success metrics, and a phased plan from prototype to production and scaling, navigating organizational complexity and influencing alignment.
- Represent Deloitte's FDE capability in client pursuits, executive briefings, and platform partner engagements, contributing to pipeline development and deal shaping.
- Lead FDE pods of 2-5 onshore anchored and offshore supported engineers, owning execution, resource management, escalations, and overall delivery health.
- Coordinate multi-pod or multi-workstream engagements, ensuring reliable architecture and consistent client experience.
- Mentor and develop junior FDEs.
- Architect and oversee delivery of LLM-enabled applications, including copilots, agentic workflows, assistants, and knowledge search experiences, using one or more enterprise AI platforms.
- Set direction for prompt engineering, tool-use patterns, and human-in-the-loop controls.
- Define evaluation frameworks covering quality, hallucination risk, safety, latency, cost, and governance, ensuring the pod meets agreed engineering quality bars.
- Review and contribute to production-quality code, guiding architecture of data pipelines powering GenAI use cases.
- Enforce strong data management, testing, CI/CD, logging, versioning, and documentation practices.
- Ensure reliable architecture and consistent client experience in hybrid onshore/offshore teams.
- Operate within hybrid onshore/offshore teams, considering security, privacy, and compliance considerations.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Data Science, or Engineering.
- 7+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, data science, or analytics engineering.
- 1+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying GenAI/LLM-powered solutions in client or production environments.
- 1+ years of experience with Palantir, including hands-on experience with one of the following key platforms: Foundry, AIP, Maven.
- 1+ years of experience leading project workstreams/engagements and translating business problems into AI solutions.
- 1+ years of experience building reliable, maintainable, and well-documented code.
- Ability to travel 50% on average based on the work you do and the clients and industries/sectors you serve.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with cloud environments (AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud) and common platform services (storage, compute, IAM, networking).
- Demonstrated ability to work directly alongside client technical teams and program stakeholders in fast-paced, ambiguous delivery environments.
- Data engineering experience with Spark, Airflow/dbt, streaming, data modeling, or ML/data science background feature engineering, experimentation, or model evaluation.
- Experience with MLOps/LLMOps practices: evaluation frameworks, model monitoring, and prompt management.
- Experience integrating LLM solutions with enterprise systems via APIs, microservices, or event-driven architectures.
- Familiarity with security, privacy, and compliance considerations.