Forward Deployed Engineer (Customer Facing)

The Role

We’re hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to be an external customer champion and help bring AI capabilities into real-world physical environments.

This role is ideal for someone who has experience with and enjoys working directly with external customers, solving messy operational challenges, and shipping practical AI-powered solutions. You won’t be working in isolation on research problems — you’ll be partnering with customers and internal teams to implement solutions that create measurable value.

You’ll work closely with senior GTM leadership and product engineering to deploy, refine, and scale AI-driven workflows across our customer base. Over time, you’ll grow into deeper ownership of deployments and strategic accounts.

What You’ll Do

Customer Deployment & Implementation

• Support and implement end-to-end AI deployments for customers, from discovery through production rollout
• Participate in on-site customer engagements (approximately 25–35% travel)
• Work with external stakeholders to translate customer operational needs into technical requirements and working solutions
• Troubleshoot and resolve production issues in collaboration with engineering
• Help document best practices and implementation playbooks

AI Solutions in Production

• Build and iterate on LLM-powered workflows, RAG pipelines, and AI-assisted automation tools
• Prototype quickly while balancing reliability and performance
• Integrate with customer systems and APIs
• Navigate real-world physical constraints (latency, connectivity, hardware limitations)
• Contribute reusable components that accelerate future deployments
• Support existing external customers and resolve their potential issues

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with product engineering to relay field feedback and improve platform capabilities
• Support technical conversations during customer engagements
• Help enable customer teams through documentation and training materials
• Contribute insights that shape product roadmap and deployment strategy

Who You Are

Required Experience

• 2–4 years in a customer-facing technical role (Solutions Engineering, Implementation Engineering, Technical Support Engineering, or similar)
• Exposure to LLMs, prompt engineering, or AI/ML workflows (production experience a plus but not required) and appetite working with AI tools
• Experience deploying technical solutions into production environments
• Strong programming skills in Python or TypeScript
• Comfortable working in ambiguity and learning new domains quickly
• Willingness to travel for customer deployments (25–35%)

Nice to Have

• Experience integrating APIs and building full-stack solutions
• Familiarity with React or SQL
• Exposure to robotics or physical systems (ROS, AMRs, industrial automation, etc.)
• Experience at a startup or in a fast-paced environment
• Background working with operational or industrial customers

Who Will Thrive in This Role

• Builders who prefer shipping working solutions over debating theoretical ones
• Engineers who enjoy interacting with customers and seeing their work deployed in the real world
• Curious generalists who can go from debugging logs to discussing workflow improvements
• Team players who collaborate closely across engineering, product, and GTM

Salary range for this role is $120,000-$140,000 based on experience and geographical location.

Please Note:

This position is remote, however, Formant only hires employees in the states of:  AZ, CA, CO, IL, KS, MA, NY, OK, OR, and PA.