Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

Afresh, the AI platform for grocery, empowers partners like Albertsons, Meijer, and Wakefern to drive smarter decisions across their entire enterprise. As a Forward Deployed AI Engineer, you'll bridge the gap between building and deploying AI solutions, working closely with customers to integrate and refine systems.

What You'll Do

• In the field (forward deployed):
  • Partner with Afresh's account lead and the customer's technical teams to scope and architect the work.
  • Embed with the customer's data and engineering teams; integrate into their cloud and data platform; build production-grade pipelines and model messy enterprise data into trustworthy data products.
  • Design and ship LLM- and agent-powered systems on that data — retrieval, agentic workflows, data-quality and analytics agents — reliable enough to run in production.
• On the platform (building the house you live in):
  • Harden what works in the field into the shared platform: the knowledge and grounding layer (knowledge graph, ontology, and retrieval) that makes grocery data usable by LLMs, the agent frameworks, and the serving infrastructure.
  • Build the evals, tracing, and tooling that let the team measure quality — accuracy, hallucination rate, latency, cost — and ship faster on the next customer.
  • Build for leverage: clean interfaces and reusable building blocks, not one-off per-customer code.
• Across both:
  • Own the flywheel: field learnings flow straight into the platform, and platform improvements show up at the next customer.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• 3+ years building production software and data systems, with strong, production-grade code.
• An architect's instinct: you can take an ambiguous problem and a messy data landscape, design a clean and workable solution, and then build it.
• Genuine AI/LLM depth — you've built real systems with LLMs and agents (retrieval/RAG, tool-use) and you evaluate quality rather than eyeball it.
• Real data-engineering depth: building and operating data pipelines, modeling messy enterprise data, and working in a modern cloud data platform (Databricks, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar).
• Ranged across both modes — you genuinely like being in front of customers and going heads-down to build reusable infrastructure, and you can switch between them without one suffering.
• Customer-facing comfort: you work well with a customer's engineers and data teams — running working sessions, explaining your thinking, and earning trust through what you deliver.
• A bias toward ownership and momentum, and comfort traveling to customer sites regularly (~10-20%).

Nice to Have

• Experience in grocery, retail, or supply chain data domains.
• Knowledge graphs, ontologies, or semantic layers in production; graph and vector stores (pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate) and hybrid search.
• MCP or similar tool/context protocols; agent frameworks (e.g., LangGraph); MLOps, model serving, and observability for LLM systems.
• Prior forward-deployed, solutions, or implementation engineering — or early-stage startup experience navigating rapid customer expansion.

Why Afresh?

• We're a mission-driven company that eliminates hundreds of millions of pounds of food waste in grocery stores every year — your work has direct, visible impact.
• You'll do both halves of the job: deploy with customers and build the platform you deploy — never a body-shop consultant, never an ivory-tower platform engineer.
• Be part of an engineering culture that's genuinely AI-forward — we want to be on the bleeding edge of agentic development, not watching from the sidelines.
• Senior team, high trust, and real ownership at a pivotal inflection point for how Afresh scales.
• Collaborative, supportive environment & awesome people

Job Details

This is a hybrid role based in the San Francisco office (2 days/week)

This position is not eligible for company sponsorship.

Salary Range in U.S.: $156,060 - $231,140

At Afresh, our mission to eliminate food waste starts with investing in our people. We provide a comprehensive support system designed to help you do your best work while maintaining a healthy, balanced life.