Forward Deployed Engineer-Live Operations

YOUR OPPORTUNITY

We have an exciting opportunity at Seaboard Foods  as a Forward Deployed Engineer-Live Operations to support our Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) and Live Operations teams in our Merriam, KS office. The Forward Deployed Engineer-Live Operations a hands-on builder role focused on owning, maintaining, and improving the Foundry applications that support critical business operations. The primary responsibility is ensuring Live Operations and RNG applications are reliable, accurate, and delivering value to the business. This includes troubleshooting issues, improving existing workflows, maintaining data models and ontology structures, and supporting users across operational teams.

Working directly with business leaders and end users, you will identify opportunities to eliminate manual processes, automate repetitive work, and develop solutions that improve operational performance. You will build applications, workflows, dashboards, and AI-enabled tools that help teams make better decisions and execute more efficiently.

The role is embedded within Live Production, Renewable Natural Gas, Transportation, Feed Milling, and other operational functions, providing broad exposure to the business and opportunities to drive meaningful impact.

ABOUT US

At Seaboard Foods, we create the most sought-after pork. As one of the nation’s leading pork producers and exporters, we are committed to producing high-quality food responsibly while connecting every step from our farms to family tables. More than 5,400 employees across five states support our farms, feed mills, and processing operations, helping deliver Prairie Fresh® pork to customers in more than 30 countries worldwide. At Seaboard Foods, we value teamwork, integrity, safety, and continuous improvement. As a Fortune 500 employer and recent Business Journal “Best Places to Work” nominee, we are proud to foster a culture where employees can grow, contribute, and make a meaningful impact.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

This list is not intended to be all-inclusive, and other duties may be assigned.

Success in this role requires strong technical and problem-solving skills, a bias toward action, and the ability to quickly move from business problems to deployed solutions. Candidates should be comfortable using modern AI-assisted development tools to accelerate software development, testing, and deployment while maintaining high standards for reliability and business value.

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily.

Primary

• Support and update existing Foundry applications across the entire Live/RNG business, these applications are mission critical and <1 year old, continually looking for opportunities to improve our current applications
• Build and develop new applications to continue to drive the business forward
• Surface high-leverage manual workflows and retire them with shipped software, delivering AI-assisted applications from prototypes to production in days rather than quarters.
• Demonstrate, every sprint, the non-negotiable expectation of this seat: builder by blood. This role writes code (with AI-assisted development), runs evaluations, and pushes to production. It does not delegate the build.

Secondary

• Mentor citizen developers and adjacent technical staff at Seaboard Foods on agentic and AI-assisted development practices.
• Present progress, results, and forward-looking plans to Seaboard Foods leadership on a recurring cadence, including quantified savings estimates, adoption metrics, and risks.
• Run trainings and workshops for internal teams as new initiatives are built and deployed, so the people closest to the work can operate and extend what ships.
• Stay current with emerging trends in agentic AI, ontology engineering, and AI-assisted software delivery, and assess their applicability to Seaboard Foods.
• Build relationships with technology vendors, partners, and research communities to maintain a pipeline of innovative solutions.
• Perform additional duties as assigned.

QUALIFICATIONS:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required or preferred. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Required

• Expert knowledge of Foundry and AIP (ontology, AIP Logic, Workshop, Pipeline Builder), or equivalent enterprise data and ontology platform experience with a clear ability to ramp quickly.
• Five (5) or more years of progressive experience shipping production software, with a recent and verifiable portfolio (repositories, deployed applications, agents in production).
• Hands-on experience building, evaluating, and deploying LLM-powered agents, including tool use, retrieval, and multi-step planning. A clear point of view on what rigorous agent evaluation actually looks like.
• Strong fluency in Python and TypeScript. Working command of at least one modern agent framework and one evaluation framework.
• Disciplined cost and latency instincts for LLM systems, including token budgeting, caching, prompt and context optimization, and routing.
• Comfortable working directly with non-technical operators, on the floor, in the office, and over the phone, to discover, scope, and validate problems.

Preferred

• Prior Forward Deployed Engineer, solutions engineer, or embedded delivery experience at a software company, AI lab, or top-tier consultancy.
• Experience with knowledge-graph and retrieval tooling such as Obsidian, graph databases, hybrid retrieval, and vector stores.
• Background in agribusiness, food production, manufacturing, logistics, or commodities.
• Open-source contributions to agent, evaluation, or developer-tools ecosystems.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS) and modern DevOps and CI/CD practices.
• Experience generating and reporting quantifiable savings estimates and ROI metrics for AI initiatives to senior leadership.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent demonstrable shipping experience.

WORK ENVIRONMENT

The physical and work demands listed below are representative of those an employee should possess to successfully perform the essential functions of the position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable qualified individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of the job.

WHY SEABOARD FOODS?

• Medical, vision, and dental benefits
• 401(k) with company match
• Paid Time Off and company holidays
• Wellness program and employee pork purchase program
• Tuition reimbursement

For a complete list of our benefits, please visit our career site: https://www.seaboardfoods.com/careers/why-sbf/

Seaboard Foods is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, gender identity, protected veterans’ status, status as a disabled individual, or any other status protected by law.