Forward-Deployed AI Engineer
Forward-deployed engineers embed directly with Plank's customers to take frontier AI from a 0 to 1 prototype to production. You own the outcome end to end: discovery, technical scoping, system design, build, and rollout, working hands-on in the customer's codebase and alongside their engineers. You translate ambiguous business problems into shippable systems, vendor-neutral across OpenAI, Anthropic, and open models, and you leave the code in the customer's repositories.What you will do:- Embed with a customer team, often on-site, and own delivery end to end: discovery, technical scoping, system design, build, and production rollout.- Drive solutions from a 0 to 1 prototype through MVP to scale, writing and reviewing production-grade code across the stack.- Build the hard parts hands-on: agents and sub-agents, MCP servers, RAG pipelines, evals, and integrations against real systems of record.- Be the primary technical owner of the engagement, partnering with the customer's engineers, domain experts, and leadership.- Codify what works into reusable building blocks, playbooks, and repeatable deployment patterns.- Bring the field back to product: surface deployment friction and eval-driven signal that sharpens what gets built next.What we are looking for:- 4 to 10 years of engineering experience, ideally customer-facing or in deployment; former founders welcome.- You write and review production-grade code across frontend and backend, with Python as a baseline and TypeScript a strong plus.- Hands-on production experience with LLMs: prompt engineering, agent development, evals, RAG, and deployment at scale.- A track record of scoping and shipping complex systems, and comfort with cloud, data pipelines, and enterprise environments.- High agency and comfort with ambiguity: you turn vague business problems into concrete technical plans and own the outcome.- Strong communication and stakeholder management, from technical discovery to the executive relationship.Nice to have:- Vertical depth in a regulated or data-heavy domain such as financial services, healthcare, or manufacturing.- Prior forward-deployed, solutions or sales engineering, or founding-engineer experience.Apply at: https://joinplank.com/careers/fde-engineer