Engineering
Forward Deployed AI Engineer
What we do
Every company is racing to put AI into everything - and very few of them can answer the questions that come right after: what is our AI actually allowed to do, what did it do last week, and can we prove it? We're building the layer that answers those questions, so teams can move fast without losing control of what their AI is doing.
Our customers are the people who carry the weight when AI goes wrong: the banks, hospitals, and insurers who have to sit across from a regulator, a board, or a customer and explain exactly what happened. We give them the confidence to say yes to AI without flying blind. It's early, the problems are complex and consequential, and the work matters - which is exactly why it's worth doing.
About this role
As a Forward Deployed AI Engineer, you're the person who turns DataStrict from a product into a working part of a customer's world. You'll sit with some of the largest, most regulated companies on earth - banks, hospitals, insurers, government agencies - and get our platform running inside their systems, wired into their identity, their data, and the specific rules their regulators hold them to.
This is deep, hands-on engineering with real people on the other side of the table. You'll design integrations, write the policies that encode a customer's actual governance requirements, work through the edge cases that only surface in a real production environment, and build whatever tooling it takes for a deployment to succeed. When something the product can't do yet stands between a customer and success, you'll build the bridge - and carry that signal back to the core engineering team so the product gets better for everyone.
It's equal parts engineer, translator, and trusted advisor. One day you're deep in an integration and a stack trace; the next you're across the table from a Chief Risk Officer, turning what they're accountable for into controls that actually run. If you love owning a customer's success end to end - technically and personally - and want your work to matter where the stakes are highest, this is that role.
What you'll do
- Own customer deployments end to end, from the first integration to a production system the customer trusts and relies on.
- Integrate DataStrict into complex enterprise environments: identity providers, data platforms, model and agent stacks, and existing security tooling.
- Translate a customer's governance and compliance requirements into concrete, working policies - and prove they do what the customer's auditors need.
- Work through hard, real-world problems across the stack, often in environments you can't fully see and under timelines that matter to the customer.
- Build the integrations, connectors, SDKs, and internal tooling that make each deployment faster and more repeatable than the last.
- Be the technical voice the customer trusts, in architecture reviews, security assessments, and the room where they decide to go live.
- Carry hard-won field signal back to product and engineering, so the gaps you hit become the roadmap that closes them.
- Set the bar for how we deploy: playbooks, reference architectures, and patterns the whole team can reuse.
What we're looking for
- A Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field - or equivalent experience shipping software in production.
- 6+ years of software engineering, including real time in customer-facing or deployment-heavy roles (forward-deployed, solutions, or platform / integration engineering).
- Strong engineering fundamentals in Python and at least one of Go, TypeScript, or Java, and the ability to move quickly through an unfamiliar codebase or system.
- Hands-on experience integrating software into enterprise environments: REST and gRPC APIs, OAuth / OIDC and SSO, containers and Kubernetes, and a major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- A working understanding of modern AI systems - LLMs, agents, RAG, and the tooling around them (the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, LangChain, vector databases) - enough to integrate and reason about them, even if you don't train them.
- Genuine comfort in front of customers: you can lead a technical conversation, earn a skeptical stakeholder's trust, and stay calm when a deployment is on the line.
- Excellent communication skills - you can move between a stack trace and a boardroom and be credible in both.
- Willingness to travel to customer sites when it counts (up to ~30%), including regulated and occasionally air-gapped environments.
Nice to have
- Experience deploying into regulated industries - financial services, healthcare, insurance, or the public sector - and familiarity with frameworks like SOC 2, HIPAA, or the EU AI Act.
- A background in security or infrastructure engineering: networking, secrets management, and private-cloud or on-prem deployments.
- Experience building policy-as-code, workflow automation, or integration platforms.
- You've been an early or founding forward-deployed engineer and helped shape how a company deploys.
This role is for you if you are
- Energized by being where the product meets the real world - close to customers, close to the hardest problems, and personally on the hook for making it work.
- A problem solver who thrives on ambiguity - happy to walk into a situation no one has solved and leave with something that works.
- Equally at home deep in code and across the table from a senior stakeholder, and able to switch between the two without missing a beat.
- At your best on a small, global, fast-moving team that's sharp, committed, and genuinely fun to be part of. :)
Not quite your role? Browse all open roles or introduce yourself.
DataStrict is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate difference and are committed to building an inclusive team where everyone can do their best work, regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. If you need a reasonable accommodation at any point in the process, tell us at [email protected] and we'll make it happen.
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