Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

Piper Companies is seeking a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer to join a leading AI and enterprise data technology organization. The Principal Forward Deployed Engineer will serve as a trusted technical advisor for strategic customers, partnering directly with executive stakeholders, architects, and AI teams to design and deploy scalable AI solutions. This role is ideal for a highly technical engineer who excels in customer-facing environments and has deep expertise in enterprise data architecture, AI applications, and governed access frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical discovery sessions with customer stakeholders to define AI use cases, data requirements, governance objectives, and deployment strategies.
• Design end-to-end AI and data architectures leveraging MCP platforms, semantic context modeling, agent frameworks, and enterprise connectivity solutions.
• Establish secure and scalable access models including RBAC, OAuth 2.1, audit logging, and governed data access for AI-powered applications.
• Partner with Product and Engineering teams to identify platform enhancement opportunities and translate customer requirements into reusable technical frameworks.
• Mentor engineers across engagements, provide technical leadership on complex implementations, and develop reference architectures that accelerate future deployments.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience as a Solutions Architect, Principal Software Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, Technical Lead, or similar role within an AI, enterprise software, or data platform organization.
• Proven experience designing, building, and deploying production-grade AI applications, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agent-based architectures.
• Strong customer-facing background with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts to architects, executive stakeholders, and architecture review boards.
• Hands-on expertise with MCP, RBAC, OAuth, enterprise integrations, APIs, SQL, modern cloud platforms, and multi-source data environments.
• Experience mentoring technical teams and serving as the senior technical authority within customer engagements.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, retirement savings options, and paid time off
• Remote work flexibility
• Up to 25% travel to support strategic customer engagements

Salary range: $170,000–$240,000 base