Forward Deployed AI Engineer

About Melior

Melior is an AI transformation firm built for the way business leaders actually want to adopt AI - strategically, practically, and with measurable impact. We serve as the AI Transformation Partner for mid-market companies, guiding them through the full adoption curve across two integrated pillars:

• Workforce Adoption. We help companies build an AI-first culture - setting AI policy and tool selection, running enterprise-wide training and upskilling, and driving the change management required to turn tool access into real, lasting behavior change.
• Custom AI Workflows. We engineer purpose-built AI workflows and agents for our clients' highest-value problems - from discovery and roadmapping through custom development that integrates directly into their existing tech stack.

What sets us apart for other players in our space is the combination of deep operational experience and real technical depth to build impactful AI solutions. 

Melior is led by a team of proven operators and technologists who have built, scaled, and exited businesses across consulting, marketing services, and technology.

• Ryan Markman, CEO - Former Bain consultant, experienced C-suite operator with a previous business exit, and an AI product leader.
• Ken Baker, COO - Two-time CEO with 15+ years leading large professional services businesses, including a marketing services firm he co-founded, scaled and exited.
• Adrien Delessert, CTO - Veteran CTO and software engineer across multiple venture-backed companies, with deep expertise in ML and AI engineering.

Joining Melior means working directly alongside a leadership team that has managed complex organizations, navigated real change management challenges, and built technical systems at scale. Now we’re applying all of it to the most consequential technology shift in business today.

The Role

As a Forward Deployed AI Engineer, you’ll work directly with our CEO, CTO, and engagement leads to design, build, and ship the custom AI workflows and agents that power our client engagements. You’ll collaborate with clients at every level of their organization—from senior executives to frontline teams. Your day-to-day might involve:

• Meeting (virtually) with clients to deeply understand their current work processes, identify pain points, and assess ways AI could help.
• Designing, building, and shipping AI workflows and agents. Implementations range in complexity, such as 
  • Custom skills
  • Low-code automations in Zapier, n8n, or Make
  • Custom-developed agentic systems, built via Claude Code or Codex, and deployed on the Melior Nexus platform, which simplifies building, deploying and maintaining custom AI apps 
• Working alongside client teams to test, refine, and measure these solutions to ensure they genuinely improve their work and create measurable efficiency gains. 
• Documenting what you learn into straightforward playbooks and resources that we can reuse across future projects.
• Collaborating with AI Program managers and Melior leadership on executive level client meetings such as QBRs & AI strategy presentations. 
• Helping us evolve our offerings and processes - as an early team member, your ideas and experiences will directly shape how we grow and the solutions we deliver.

This role is perfect for someone who loves seeing immediate, tangible results from their work, has a strong desire to accelerate and master their capabilities with AI, and enjoys the satisfaction of solving diverse, real-world business problems with technology.

This is a hybrid role in Philadelphia, but we are open to remote work for the right candidate.

Who We're Looking For

We think you'd be great for this role if you:

• Have spent 2-5+ years in roles like solutions engineering, software engineering, technical operations, internal tools, or automation in a fast-paced, dynamic environment. We’re looking for experience where you built real things, navigated ambiguity, juggled multiple priorities, and owned outcomes.
• Are confident and thoughtful in conversations at all levels of an organization, able to quickly build trust and understand people's genuine needs. Client services experience is a plus.
• Are genuinely excited about generative AI and have gotten your hands dirty building with it, whether that’s side projects, API experiments, vibe-coding with tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or Lovable, or stitching together workflows in Zapier, n8n, or Make. This is a hard requirement; we want to see what you’ve built.
• Have a structured way of thinking about problems: you're great at framing messy questions, estimating the potential impact of solutions, and organizing your work clearly.
• Are organized and proactive—you're good at managing your own projects, deadlines, and client communications in a fast-paced, small-team environment.

Bonus points (but not required!) if you have a formal software engineering background or have shipped production code, though we care more about what you’ve actually built than the credentials behind it.

Why Join Melior?

• Real Impact: You’ll have a direct influence on the trajectory of our company. Your work and ideas will shape how Melior operates and grows.
• Accelerate AI Expertise: For our money, there’s no better way to accelerate your practical AI knowledge than to join Melior. You’ll go beyond theory to build real-world solutions clients use immediately.
• Growth & Equity: Our business is growing rapidly, and we want you to share in our growth. As an early team member, you’ll have equity in the company and a clear pathway to grow into a leadership role
• Variety and Depth: You'll explore different industries and tackle a wide range of interesting, practical problems. One week might involve content workflows at a marketing agency, another could be streamlining sales processes at a SaaS firm.

If you're excited about building practical AI solutions that genuinely help people do better work, we’d love to hear from you.

The target salary for this role is $100,000 - $150,000 per year.