Principal Forward Deployed Engineer (AI)

Location: Remote, U.S.; West Coast preferred. Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. Travel required up to 25%.

Base pay: $175,000–$240,000 per year.

Company

hirify.global provides enterprise data connectivity, replication, semantic intelligence, and governance for AI and analytics workloads across more than 350 data sources.

What you will do

• Lead technical discovery workshops with customer architects, data leaders, and AI teams.
• Scope production AI deployments with acceptance criteria for agent accuracy, data coverage, and governance.
• Design end-to-end architectures across Connect AI, MCP configuration, semantic context modeling, agent tooling, and governance.
• Define secure agent access patterns using RBAC, OAuth 2.1, semantic scoping, and audit trails.
• Identify product and architectural gaps, author technical specifications, and create reusable reference architectures and MCP blueprints.
• Mentor FDEs and partner with Product, Engineering, Solutions Engineering, and Customer Success on technical standards.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience as a Solutions Architect, Principal SE, Forward Deployed Engineer, or Technical Lead in data platforms, AI, or enterprise SaaS.
• Experience building and shipping production AI applications and working with SaaS platforms in an architecture-focused role.
• Strong AI/ML literacy, including LLMs, agentic architectures, RAG patterns, and prompt engineering.
• Hands-on experience with SQL, ETL/CDC pipelines, API design, ODBC/JDBC, and multi-source enterprise data integration.
• Experience designing multi-tenant architectures, governed data access, RBAC, OAuth 2.1, semantic scoping, and audit-trail requirements.
• Customer-facing experience with senior technical buyers and architecture review boards, plus experience mentoring engineers without direct reporting relationships.

Nice to have

• Experience with the MCP protocol and AI agent frameworks such as LangChain, CrewAI, or Copilot Studio.
• Previous experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer or in a similar embedded customer-facing engineering role.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-friendly, high-trust work environment focused on collaboration, curiosity, and innovation.
• Company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance premiums.
• Health Savings Account with company contribution and Flexible Spending Account options.
• 20 days of paid time off and 11 paid holidays.
• 401(k) with a 100% company match up to 6% of contributions.
• Professional development and learning opportunities aligned with career goals.