Forward Deployed Engineer

Posted 8 Days Ago
10 Locations
In-Office
150K-185K Annually
Mid level
Artificial Intelligence • Machine Learning • Database
The Role
Embed with client teams to map real-world processes and build production-grade agentic workflows. Design integrations, retrieval/RAG systems, observability, and guardrails; run demos, ship working workflows, and hand off extendable solutions.
Summary Generated by Built In
Company overview:

Blue Orange Digital is a data engineering and AI consultancy that builds production-grade data platforms, ML systems, and GenAI solutions for companies that take their data seriously. We are not a staff augmentation shop or a slide-deck consultancy. We are builders. Our teams embed directly into client organizations, shipping code alongside their teams to accelerate delivery and build lasting capability.

Our clients include Fortune 500 enterprises and high-growth startups across industries. We partner with Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, GCP, and Azure to deliver battle-tested solutions that drive measurable ROI.

Note: Please submit your resume in English, as all application materials must be in English for review and consideration.

Engagement: Independent Contractor (with potential transition to full‑time employment)

Position overview:

This is the person we send into a client when the problem is not yet a spec. You sit with their operators, finance leads, and analysts, watch how work actually gets done, and turn messy real-world processes into agentic AI workflows that hold up in production.

You are dual-fluent by design. In the morning you map a claims-handling or order-to-cash process with a business owner who has never written a line of code. In the afternoon you wire that process into an agent that calls their CRM, queries their warehouse, and routes exceptions to the right human. You translate in both directions, turning vague business pain into concrete technical scope, and turning technical constraints into options a non-technical stakeholder can decide on.

The role is a balanced bridge. Roughly half your time is discovery, facilitation, and trust-building with client teams. The other half is hands-on engineering: building the agent logic, the integrations, and the evaluation that proves it works. You will not stop at a prototype. You ship the workflow, instrument it, and hand over something the client can run and extend.

Responsibilities:
  • Embed with client teams to understand how work actually happens, shadowing operators and mapping processes that live in people's heads, spreadsheets, and a dozen disconnected tools

  • Break down complex business processes into agentic workflows: decompose a goal into steps, decide what an agent automates versus where a human stays in the loop, and design the tool-use and decision logic to match

  • Build production-grade agentic workflows using frameworks like LangGraph and LangChain, including tool calling, memory, routing, retries, and clean failure recovery

  • Build integrations to the data and operational systems that workflows depend on: CRMs, ERPs, ticketing systems, data warehouses, internal APIs, and document stores, handling auth, rate limits, and reliability

  • Enable core platform capabilities that the whole engagement reuses: retrieval over client documents, structured output and function calling, prompt versioning, logging, and observability

  • Design evaluation and guardrails that make a workflow trustworthy in an enterprise setting: task-specific evals, regression checks, PII handling, and human review steps where the stakes demand them

  • Run working sessions and demos that keep business stakeholders bought in, translating technical tradeoffs into clear decisions about cost, risk, and timeline

  • Document what you build and hand it over cleanly, so client teams can operate and extend the workflows after the engagement

  • Bring patterns back to BOD, turning what worked on one engagement into reusable building blocks for the next

Requirements:
  • 3 or more years of software engineering experience building systems that run in production, plus the judgment to know what production-ready means

  • Hands-on experience building with LLMs: prompting, function calling, structured output, retrieval, and at least one agent or multi-step workflow you took past the prototype stage

  • Strong integration skills, you have connected real systems through REST APIs, webhooks, SDKs, and databases, and dealt with auth, pagination, rate limits, and flaky upstreams

  • Proficiency in Python, comfort with async patterns, API design, and the data-pipeline reliability that agentic workflows live or die on

  • Working knowledge of SQL and data systems, enough to pull what a workflow needs from a client's warehouse or operational database

  • Real client-facing or cross-functional skill: you can sit with a non-technical stakeholder, draw out how their process works, and earn their trust without talking down to them

  • Strong written and verbal communication, you can explain why an agent took a wrong turn, or why a manual step should stay manual, to a business owner without losing them

  • A bias toward shipping, you would rather get a working workflow in front of users this week than perfect an architecture diagram

  • Production experience with agent frameworks (LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI) or building custom orchestration

  • Experience with RAG systems: chunking, embeddings, vector stores (Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, pgvector), and re-ranking

Preferred qualifications:
  • Familiarity with LLM evaluation: task-specific metrics, LLM-as-judge, and regression test suites

  • Background in process mapping, solutions engineering, forward-deployed work, or technical consulting across concurrent engagements

  • Experience with workflow and integration platforms (Temporal, Airflow, Zapier, n8n) or iPaaS tooling

  • Exposure to a major cloud and its AI services (AWS Bedrock or SageMaker, GCP Vertex AI, Azure ML)

Benefits:
  • Competitive compensation with performance bonuses

  • Problems that matter, real client processes with real constraints, not greenfield sandboxes

  • A front-row seat to how a dozen industries actually run, and the chance to automate the parts that slow them down

  • Direct access to modern AI infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Azure, Databricks, Snowflake, and the open-source ecosystem

  • Builder culture where engineers lead and ship, with no bureaucracy between you and the work

  • Professional development budget and certification support

  • Flexible remote work environment

  • A team that will push back on your design decisions and make them better

  • Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO)

  • Paid parental/bereavement leave

Salary: $150,000 - $185,000 (yearly)

Background checks may be required for certain positions/projects.

Blue Orange Digital is an equal-opportunity employer.

Skills Required

  • 3+ years software engineering experience building production systems
  • Hands-on experience building with LLMs: prompting, function calling, structured output, retrieval, and productionized multi-step agents
  • Production experience with agent frameworks (LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI) or building custom orchestration
  • Experience with RAG systems: chunking, embeddings, vector stores (Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, pgvector), and re-ranking
  • Strong integration skills connecting CRMs, ERPs, ticketing systems, internal APIs, warehouses, and document stores (REST, webhooks, SDKs, auth, rate limits)
  • Proficiency in Python, comfort with async patterns, API design, and production data-pipeline reliability
  • Working knowledge of SQL and data systems to query warehouses and operational databases
  • Client-facing / cross-functional skills: run working sessions, map processes, and translate technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders
  • Strong written and verbal communication
  • Bias toward shipping and delivering production-ready workflows rather than prototypes
  • Familiarity with LLM evaluation (task metrics, LLM-as-judge, regression test suites)
  • Background in process mapping, forward-deployed work, solutions engineering, or technical consulting
  • Experience with workflow/integration platforms (Temporal, Airflow) or iPaaS tooling (Zapier, n8n)
  • Exposure to major cloud AI services (AWS Bedrock or SageMaker, GCP Vertex AI, Azure ML)

Blue Orange Digital Compensation & Benefits Highlights

The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Blue Orange Digital and has not been reviewed or approved by Blue Orange Digital.

  • Healthcare Strength Health coverage is described as comprehensive across medical, dental, and vision in current job postings, with some descriptions indicating particularly strong plan generosity. This points to a solid core insurance foundation for U.S.-based roles.
  • Retirement Support Current role descriptions consistently include a 401(k) with company match. This adds long‑term financial value to the overall package.
  • Leave & Time Off Breadth Certain postings specify unlimited PTO along with paid parental and bereavement leave. This breadth of time‑off options supports flexibility for varied life events.

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The Company
HQ: New York, NY
75 Employees
Year Founded: 2015

What We Do

Blue Orange is a data science and machine learning consulting and development firm. We build modern data warehousing to support machine learning and AI. We help companies integrate these insights to drive data-driven decision making.

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