Forward Deployed AI Engineer (USA Based)

NielsenIQ•New York, NY

7h•$110,000 - $160,000•Remote

About The Position

The Forward Deployed AI Engineer is the builder on the team. You operate like an early-stage startup CTO inside a Fortune 500 client: deep, fast, and comfortable with ambiguity. You write production-grade code, ship a working v0 in weeks — not quarters — and measure your own success by movement in the client's numbers, not code shipped.

Requirements

Strong software engineering fundamentals: production Python and SQL, data pipelines, APIs
Hands-on with modern AI tooling — LLM APIs, agent frameworks, retrieval systems
Full-stack enough to ship a usable application end-to-end on your own
Bias to speed and client impact over perfect architecture
Comfortable client-facing: you demo your own work and defend your own trade-offs

Nice To Haves

Forward-deployed, solutions engineering, or startup experience
Experience with retail, CPG, or commercial data at scale

Responsibilities

Build data pipelines joining NIQ's consumer and retail data with the client's own sales, inventory, and margin data
Design and ship AI decision applications: recommendation workflows, LLM-agent-driven analysis, approval flows with guardrails, full auditability
Navigate broken, incomplete enterprise data environments — and ship anyway
Work in a 2–3 person deployment team with a data scientist and an AI Deployment Architect, dedicated to one client
Surface reusable patterns from each deployment back into NIQ's product platform