Forward Deployed Engineer | Careers at Alyra Technology
Embed inside a client's business and build the AI system that fixes their problem. Their standups, their constraints, your code in production.
Forward Deployed Engineer
Engineering. 5+ years. Charlotte, NC. full time.
Embed inside a client's business and build the AI system that fixes their problem. Their standups, their constraints, your code in production.
The mission
Forward deployed means what it sounds like. You are not writing a specification for someone else to build, and you are not advising from the outside. You sit inside the client's operation, learn how the work actually gets done, and build the thing that changes it. Most of our engagements are in regulated environments, so the system has to be right and has to be able to show why it is right. The distance between understanding a problem and shipping a fix is the whole job.
Responsibilities
- Embed with a client team: their standups, their systems, their constraints, on site when the work needs it
- Build and ship production AI systems, agents, retrieval pipelines and integrations that run on the client's own stack
- Stand up the evaluation and monitoring that proves the system is right, and keeps proving it after you have moved on
- Turn what an operator describes informally into a technical problem worth solving, then build the fix in front of them
- Present the work directly to the people who sign off on it, including the ones who start out sceptical
- Own what you build after launch, including the parts that only break at volume
- Bring back the patterns that generalise, so the next engagement starts further along than this one did
What we look for
- Five or more years shipping production software that other people depended on
- Hands-on production experience with LLM applications: retrieval pipelines, tool calling or agentic workflows. Prototypes and notebooks are not the same thing
- Strong Python, and the integration skill to make systems talk to each other that were never designed to
- Experience evaluating a non-deterministic system: test sets, regression suites, and a definition of correct you can defend to a client
- Genuinely client facing. You can run a working session with operators and explain a technical tradeoff to someone who is not an engineer and is accountable for the outcome
- Comfortable with high autonomy in ambiguity. Most engagements begin before anyone has written the problem down
- Based in Charlotte or willing to move there, and willing to travel to a client site when the work needs it
Nice to have
- Prior forward deployed, field engineering, solutions engineering or consulting work
- Depth in a regulated domain: pharmaceutical manufacturing, insurance, legal or financial services
- Work where traceability was a requirement rather than a feature: audit trails, citations, change control
- Orchestration tooling such as LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex or n8n
In person in Charlotte, North Carolina. Hybrid or remote can be discussed for the right person.
Salary plus performance bonus, discussed openly on the first call.
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