Forward Deployed Architect

Climb

45d•Remote

About The Position

The Forward Deployed Architect owns the technical architecture of a client engagement. You take business objectives and translate them into a production-ready system, defining the platform architecture, technical standards, integration patterns, and implementation approach that guide delivery from discovery through production. This is a hands-on architecture role. You stay close to the implementation, solving the hardest technical problems, reviewing critical design decisions, and writing code where it adds the most value. Your responsibility is to ensure the system remains coherent as multiple workstreams come together, balancing scalability, security, maintainability, performance, cost, and delivery speed. You partner closely with the Forward Deployed AI Lead to align technical decisions with engagement goals and business outcomes. While the AI Lead owns the overall engagement and client relationship, you own the system itself, providing the technical direction that enables the engineering team to deliver with confidence.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering or technical architecture experience, including production systems in cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
Proven experience serving as the technical design authority for production systems delivered to customers.
Hands-on depth across one or more of: LLM application and agent development, production data engineering, or backend systems at scale.
Demonstrated ability to guide multiple engineers while maintaining architectural consistency across the system.
Still codes: comfortable working on the critical path and proving out the hard parts yourself.
Strong communicator: technically precise with engineers, clear and confident with VP- and C-level leadership.
High tolerance for ambiguity; can turn a loosely scoped problem into a build the team can execute.

Nice To Haves

Experience building production AI systems: RAG pipelines, agents, fine-tuned models, or LLM-native applications.
Hands-on experience with Databricks (Delta Lake, Workflows, Unity Catalog, Mosaic AI) is a strong plus.
Background in a consulting firm, systems integrator, or professional services environment.
Familiarity with SOW-based, outcome-priced delivery and active scope management.
Databricks experience is valued but not required at hire. Both Databricks and Anthropic certification are expected to be obtained post-hire.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end system architecture on your engagement: platform architecture, data and AI design, integration patterns, observability, security, and operational readiness.
Take engagement objectives and turn it into a coherent target architecture and an implementation plan the engineering team can execute against.
Make the platform and pattern decisions, model selection, agent and pipeline architecture, data flow, security, and cost, and stand behind them.
Guide and review the engineering team's implementation, ensuring individual workstreams integrate into a coherent production system.
Stay hands-on: write code on the critical path and prove out the hard parts of the architecture yourself.
Partner with the Forward Deployed AI Lead to align architecture with business priorities, engagement scope, and delivery sequencing.
Deliver architecture documentation, implementation guidance, and production-ready systems that customers can confidently operate after handoff.
Contribute reference architectures, patterns, and accelerators back to the practice.