Associate Forward Deployed Engineer

Handshake•San Francisco, CA

7d•Onsite

About The Position

As an Associate Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll work alongside senior engineers and directly with our customers, leading AI labs, to help solve their most pressing technical challenges. You'll support the design and deployment of solutions that impact customer workflows and model performance, working across the stack, shipping quickly, and iterating based on real-world feedback. This is a fast-paced, high-exposure role where you'll learn by doing in ambiguous, constantly evolving environments. This is a unique opportunity early in your career to combine hands-on engineering with direct customer engagement, building not just the "what" but the "how" of our most important deployments.

Requirements

0–2 years of professional software engineering experience (internships, co-ops, or project-based work count).
Familiarity with ReactJS and TypeScript, with an eye for detail, usability, and accessibility.
Foundational understanding of relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL) and data modeling concepts.
Some exposure to cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) and deployment pipelines.
Passion for clean, maintainable code and building reliable, performant systems.
Strong communication skills and a willingness to collaborate across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Comfortable working in a fast-paced, dynamic environment with a hunger to learn and grow.

Nice To Haves

Coursework, projects, or internship experience involving LLMs or other AI-powered products.
Familiarity with component libraries, design systems, or building reusable interfaces.
Interest in or exposure to performance optimization and scaling of frontend or full-stack applications.

Responsibilities

Partner with AI labs and internal engineering and operations teams to help identify needs, gather requirements, and support solution design.
Work on custom asks from customers to help rapidly prototype and deploy tailored solutions that address unique, high-impact challenges.
Tackle complex technical problems with support from senior engineers, taking increasing ownership of delivery from concept through deployment.
Rapidly prototype, test, and iterate on tools in response to real-time feedback.
Contribute to architectural discussions and help establish best practices for reliability, scalability, and security in high-impact deployments.
Document solutions and help create technical playbooks for repeatable, scalable deployment processes.