Forward Deployed Engineer (AI)

Location: New York City, United States — on-site five days per week with 20% travel

Salary: $170,000–$190,000 plus equity

Company

hirify.global is a specialist recruitment partner representing opportunities with ambitious AI, machine learning, data, and engineering companies. This role is with a high-growth AI-native software company rebuilding technology for public institutions.

What you will do

• Build production software adapting a reusable platform to complex public-sector customer workflows and environments.
• Translate ambiguous operational requirements into technical designs and working systems.
• Architect integrations with legacy databases, APIs, infrastructure, and customer-owned systems.
• Decide which capabilities remain deployment-specific and which should become reusable platform features.
• Partner with product and customer-facing colleagues to resolve technical issues and unblock deployments.
• Improve internal tooling and use AI-assisted development tools to increase engineering velocity while maintaining technical judgment.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and evidence of building and shipping meaningful systems end-to-end.
• Experience taking software beyond prototypes into reliable production environments.
• Ability to reason at both architectural and implementation levels and communicate technical trade-offs clearly.
• Hands-on experience with integrations, data flows, APIs, databases, and unfamiliar systems.
• Hands-on use of modern AI coding tools as part of the development workflow.
• High ownership, strong independent technical judgment, and effectiveness in ambiguous, fast-moving startup environments.
• Ability to work effectively with customers and non-engineering stakeholders.
• Ability to work in person in New York City five days per week.
• Permanent, full-time commitment with 20% travel.

Nice to have

• No optional qualifications were specified.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to shape the engineering platform, internal tooling, culture, and technical direction during company growth.
• Work on varied engineering problems that move directly into real operational environments.
• Public-sector impact combined with ownership and potential upside in an early-stage technology company.
• Work with AI-assisted engineering tools including Claude and Codex, SQL and legacy database integrations, single-tenant deployments, agentic workflow orchestration, APIs, data integrations, and reusable software primitives.