Staff Forward Deployed AI Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Staff Forward Deployed AI Engineer (AI): Building production-grade AI systems for B2B companies with an accent on agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, and complex document processing. Focus on leading the San Diego engineering team, mentoring engineers, and translating ambiguous business problems into scalable technical architectures.

Location: Hybrid; must be based in San Diego, CA

Salary: $165,000 – $200,000

Company

An AI strategy and integration firm specializing in production AI systems for private equity, wholesale lending, real estate, and SaaS.

What you will do

• Manage and mentor two engineers on the San Diego team, owning their technical growth and delivery quality.
• Drive architectural decisions for agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, and production automation.
• Develop and ship complex AI systems from LLM orchestration and evaluation to data pipelines and cloud infrastructure.
• Collaborate with clients to translate ambiguous business problems into concrete system designs and delivery plans.
• Establish engineering standards through rigorous code reviews, pairing, and reference implementations.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• 2+ years of building production LLM-powered systems (RAG, agents, structured extraction).
• Expert-level Python and strong full-stack fundamentals.
• Production cloud experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Must be based in San Diego, CA with reliable overlap with Colombia business hours.
• Fluent English and clear communication for technical stakeholder management.

Nice to have

• AI-first working style, using AI tools daily to multiply personal and team output.

Culture & Benefits

• Direct technical leadership autonomy with the ability to make high-impact calls.
• AI-native culture that integrates cutting-edge tools into internal operations.
• Early access to frontier models through partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI.
• Upside potential as an early member of a bootstrapped and profitable company.
• Bureaucracy-free environment where the best idea wins regardless of hierarchy.