Principal Forward Deployed Engineer – Applied AI Focus

About the role

This is the deep-end engineering role on the FDE bench. You're not just configuring on the platform — you're building off it, into it, and around it. On a typical engagement, you're working side-by-side with the client's own engineering team: integrating into their loan origination system, their data warehouse, their identity stack, their CI. You're the technical authority in the room. You're still forward deployed, still co-owning the strategic outcome, still client-facing. But your edge is depth — system design, distributed architecture, secure integration, and the ability to ship production code under banking-grade scrutiny.

What You'll Do

• Lead the technical design and delivery of complex banking AI engagements, including off-platform builds and bespoke integrations into client systems
• Partner directly with client engineering, security, and architecture teams — speak their language, respect their constraints, design for their reality
• Architect end-to-end agentic systems: data ingress, model orchestration, evals, observability, security, and the production wrapper around all of it
• Make the call on what to build on Titan's platform vs. what to build bespoke vs. what to push back into our roadmap
• Mentor mid-level FDEs and influence platform direction by codifying what you learn into reusable assets and patterns
• Represent Titan's engineering credibility to banking CTOs, CISOs, and their architects

Who you are

• A senior engineer with real production scars. You've shipped systems that mattered to real users, at meaningful scale or under meaningful constraint. A builder above all.
• Title less interesting than slope. Many of the best people we know took unconventional paths to get here — that's a feature, not an exception.
• A strong client-facing presence. You can hold your own with a bank CTO, push back on a CISO's threat model with substance, and translate between engineers and executives in real time.
• A systems thinker. You see how a piece fits — and where it doesn't — before you start typing. Hypothesis-driven, opinion-strong, ego-light. You commit to a direction, you ship to test it, and you change course when the data says to.
• Banking or regulated-industry experience strongly preferred — financial services, insurance, healthcare, defense, energy, or similar.
• Technical foundation
• Senior-level full-stack with a strong backend spike — distributed systems, API design, secure integration patterns, infrastructure fluency
• Deep experience building production-grade agents using LangChain, LangGraph, DeepAgents, and model-provider SDKs (Claude SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK)
• Fluency in agent search patterns — agent file search, vector RAG, vectorless RAG — and the tradeoffs between them
• Strong working knowledge of AI security frameworks: observability, data controls, model gateways, prompt and tool-call sandboxing
• Hands-on experience designing and running evals; familiarity with training and fine-tuning loops
• Process orchestration and automation at scale
• Comfort owning architectural decisions across the full stack of a production AI system

Why Titan

• We're building the AI platform for banking because most of the two million people employed by 4,000+ U.S. banks cannot safely and securely use modern AI tools at work — and none of them are using AI purpose-built for their domain.
• We're changing that. Our platform includes:
• Titan Foundry — secure gateway to top AI models for bank employees
• Banking-Reasoning Models — our flagship small language models for financial services, trained by ex-regulators and banking leaders
• Banking Agents — a configurable AI application layer with expertise in lending, compliance, underwriting, and operations

What we offer

• Competitive base salary plus meaningful pre-Series A equity (senior-level grant)
• Remote-first with regular client travel (~30–50%, depending on engagement)
• Unlimited PTO
• 100% of employee medical, dental, and vision premiums covered by Titan
• Compensation Range: $180K - $250K