Principal Forward Deployment Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Washington.

📋 Description

• Facilitate technical discovery workshops with customer architects, data leaders, and AI teams.

• Identify and map data sources, establish the MCP Workspace scope, and determine agent tooling requirements.

• Take ownership of scoping for AI deployments, ensuring acceptance criteria for agent accuracy, data coverage, and governance are met.

• Convert AI and data concepts into architecture proposals suitable for executives and advocate for trade-offs to CxO stakeholders.

• Lead and develop a team of FDEs responsible for delivering production systems with advanced models.

• Manage the complete technical and business value outcomes from discovery through to deployment, adoption, and handoff.

• Collaborate with customer engineers, operators, and domain experts to establish scope, technical requirements, and measurable outcomes.

• Create solutions that encompass MCP server configuration, semantic context modeling, and governance integration.

• Architect agent orchestration and specify production data, schema, and action access.

• Develop governed AI-agent access patterns utilizing RBAC, OAuth 2.1, semantic scoping, and audit trails.

• Establish AI best practices incorporating agents, skills, and LLMs.

• Identify architectural and product gaps during enterprise engagements and collaborate with Product and Engineering to implement scalable solutions.

• Write technical specifications and provide implementation recommendations.

• Create reusable reference architectures, deployment patterns, and MCP blueprints.

• Transform recurring deployment challenges into platform capabilities and architectural standards.

• Codify effective practices into tools, playbooks, and roadmap contributions.

• Escalate critical issues related to product behavior, customer environments, and delivery practices.

• Establish FDE performance standards and foster team growth through direct feedback.

• Define staffing and support models for scalable field teams.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 15 years of experience in engineering or technical delivery.

• More than 2 years of experience managing high-performing FDEs or customer-facing engineers.

• At least 7 years in roles such as Solutions Architect, Principal SE, Forward Deployed Engineer, or Technical Lead at a data platform, AI, or enterprise SaaS company.

• Customer-facing experience with senior technical buyers and architecture review boards.

• Proficient in translating complex AI and data concepts into architecture proposals suitable for executives.

• Experience in building and deploying production AI applications, beyond just prototypes.

• Background in working on SaaS platforms in an architecture-related role.

• Proven ability to lead high-pressure technical projects from prototype to production.

• Capable of writing and reviewing production-grade frontend and backend code in JavaScript or Python.

• Experience in building or deploying systems utilizing LLMs or generative models.

• Strong understanding of AI/ML concepts, including LLM capabilities, agentic architectures, RAG patterns, and prompt engineering.

• Ability to define multi-tenant architectural patterns and security objectives.

• Hands-on experience with enterprise data integration, including SQL, ETL/CDC pipelines, API design, ODBC/JDBC, and multi-source connectivity.

• Skilled in designing governed AI-agent data access using RBAC, OAuth 2.1, semantic scoping, and audit trails.

• Familiarity with contemporary data stacks such as Snowflake, Databricks, and Salesforce.

• Experience with cloud-native deployment patterns.

• Proven track record in mentoring junior engineers without direct reporting lines.

• Nice to have: direct experience with MCP protocol and AI agent frameworks like LangChain, CrewAI, or Copilot Studio.

• Nice to have: previous experience as an FDE or in a similar embedded customer-facing engineering role.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive base salary ranging from $200,000 to $225,000.

• Additional performance incentives linked to revenue.

• Flexible work schedules.

• Opportunities for remote work.

• Paid time off and holidays.

• Flexible and discretionary time off policies.

• Comprehensive healthcare coverage for you and your family.

• Retirement plan options.

• Flexible spending accounts.

• Health savings accounts.

• Life and AD&D insurance coverage.

• Training in communication skills.

• Stress management programs.

• Opportunities for professional certifications.

• Access to technical and soft skill training.

• Chance to collaborate with a diverse team in a relaxed and open environment.

• Opportunity to work abroad at one of Accellor’s global centers.