Forward Deployed Engineer
Location: Full-Time · Dallas, Texas (or Remote with travel)
You ship AI in the real world — not the demo
Most engineers build products and hand them off. You stay until they work.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer at THE 8800, you'll embed directly with our clients — Fortune 500s, high-growth startups, VC-backed companies — and own the technical delivery of AI products inside their organizations. You're not a consultant who writes decks. You write code, debug integrations, and make judgment calls that move the product forward.
What you'll do
You'll work embedded in client teams — typically 4–12 weeks per engagement — building, configuring, and stabilizing AI-powered products. Day to day that means:
Designing and shipping RAG pipelines, AI agents, and LLM integrations tailored to the client's data and workflows
Translating vague business requirements into working systems — fast
Debugging production issues under pressure, on-site, with stakeholders watching
Training client engineers and teams on how to operate and extend what you've built
Acting as the technical voice of THE 8800 in the room — credible, direct, and clear
What we're looking for
You've shipped software in production. You know how messy real enterprise data is. You're comfortable being the smartest person in the room and also admitting what you don't know.
Must have:
4+ years of software engineering experience
Hands-on experience building with LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, etc.) — prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, evals
Strong Python; proficiency in at least one cloud platform (AWS, GCP, Azure)
Ability to travel to client sites (25–50%)
Excellent communication — you can explain a vector database to a CFO and a token budget to a junior dev
Nice to have:
Experience with enterprise data stacks (Snowflake, Databricks, dbt)
Background in a Big 4, Palantir, or other client-embedded technical role
Startup experience — you've had to build things before the requirements were clear
Why THE 8800
We're an AI-native product development company with 75 engineers, 18 AI specialists, and a track record of building real products for companies like UFC, Toyota, Freyr Energy, and Kindly Human. We don't do staff augmentation — we build, and we own outcomes.
Build with us. You'll work on real AI products — not proofs of concept that die in a slide deck. Every engagement ships something that matters.
Launch with us. You'll be in the room when products go live, owning the technical outcome alongside the client. No handoffs. No hiding behind a project manager.
Grow with us. You'll work across industries and problem spaces that most engineers never see. We invest in your learning — with dedicated time, budget, and a team of 18 AI specialists to learn from.
- Offices in Dallas, TX · Perth, AU · Stuttgart, DE
- Competitive salary + performance bonus
- Full benefits
- Dedicated time and budget for your own AI learning and side experiments
Apply
We'd love to hear from you. Tell us about a technical problem you solved that required both engineering and communication to get right.
Interested? Drop a note to explore@the8800.com and let's talk.
