Forward Deployed Engineer
Our client is a consulting firm that builds AI systems for its customers and puts them into production. The work lands in the customer's business, not in a deck.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer you work on site with the customer. You're in their offices, in their data, in the meetings where the real problem comes out — which is often not the problem the brief described. You then build it, ship it, and stay long enough to see whether it holds up.
You'd suit this if you like being close to the people you're building for, and you'd rather solve a specific problem than design a general one. You'll write code across the full stack, make architecture decisions without waiting for a committee, and own how they turn out. New customer, new industry, new set of constraints, every few months.
This is a 12-month contract engagement based in Melbourne, at $1,250 per day.
What you'll do
- Embed with customer teams to work out what they actually need, then design and build it end to end
- Ship production applications across the full stack — front end, services, data, deployment
- Integrate LLMs, retrieval, embeddings and agent frameworks into systems people rely on daily
- Stand up secure, scalable cloud architecture and own it through to monitoring and iteration
- Build the operational layer around models: prompt and version management, pipelines, evaluation, cost and latency tuning
- Work with messy real-world data — text, documents, images, audio — including everything nobody warned you about
- Translate between the customer's language and the engineering team's, in both directions
- Lift the standard around you: reusable components, sensible patterns, mentoring, honest code review
What you'll bring
- Strong full stack engineering, with real production depth on both sides of the stack
- Hands-on experience taking GenAI or LLM-based features into production, not just prototypes
- Solid cloud skills and the judgement to know when a simpler architecture is the right answer
- Confidence in front of customers — including when the news isn't good
- Comfort with ambiguity, shifting scope and the occasional half-defined brief
- The instinct to ask what problem this actually solves before writing a line of code
Nice to have: consulting or client-facing delivery background, exposure to regulated environments, and experience mentoring engineers.
