Overview
The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) works shoulder-to-shoulder with customers to design, build, and ship AI-powered solutions directly in their environment. Sitting at the intersection of engineering, consulting, and product, the FDE turns ambiguous business problems into working software — fast — and ensures every deployment drives measurable value.
Your Role and Responsibilities
What You’ll Do
REQUIREMENTS
- Embed with client teams to understand workflows, data, and pain points, then design end-to-end AI solutions that solve them.
- Rapidly prototype, build, and deploy applications on top of the core platform and LLM/agent frameworks.
- Integrate the product with customer systems (APIs, databases, data warehouses, internal tools).
- Own solutions from first prototype to production rollout, iterating quickly based on real usage.
- Act as the technical voice of the customer, feeding requirements and edge cases back to product and engineering.
- Troubleshoot in live environments and unblock adoption across technical and business stakeholders.
- Create reusable accelerators, templates, and playbooks to scale delivery across accounts.
What This Role Requires
Education
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent hands-on experience).
Experience
- 3+ years building and shipping production software in a customer-facing or high-ambiguity environment.
- Career Site — AI & Emerging-Tech Job Descriptions 2
Proven track record of owning projects end-to-end, from discovery to deployment. - Experience integrating with third-party APIs and enterprise systems.
Technical Skills
- Strong programming skills in Python and/or TypeScript/JavaScript.
- Experience with LLMs, RAG pipelines, and agent frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar).
- Comfort with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and modern deployment tooling (Docker, CI/CD).
- Solid understanding of data modeling, SQL, and API design.
- Nice to have: front-end frameworks (React) and data pipeline tooling.
Soft Skills
- Exceptional communication — translates between engineers, executives, and end users.
- Bias for action and comfort operating with incomplete requirements.
- Strong ownership mindset and customer empathy.
- Adaptable, resourceful, and energized by fast-changing environments.
Working at Motivus
What Working Here Looks Like
- Guild community: You’re part of the [Data & AI / Backend / Cloud] Guild — a community of practitioners in your domain. Structured learning, peer review, and certifications happen here, not in isolation.
- Outcome accountability: Your work connects directly to a client result. We don’t measure activity — we measure delivery.
- AI in your workflow: Through AI Champions and Guild initiatives, you’ll actively use and shape how AI tools are applied to engineering work — not just hear about it in a townhall.
- Defined career path: Structured progression from individual contributor to technical lead to Guild leadership, with certifications and milestones that are visible, not arbitrary.
