Founding Forward Deployed Engineer, Biopharma AI

Lutra•Toronto, ON

18d•Remote

About The Position

This role is for a founding Forward Deployed Engineer on a new team at the intersection of product and enterprise customers. The engineer will split time between core product engineering and building within customer environments. Success involves understanding customer data environments, deploying and configuring the platform, building custom integrations and workflows, and ensuring the product delivers measurable value. This is a hands-on coding role, not sales engineering or solutions consulting, with an expectation that approximately 80% of built code will merge back into the main platform. The role also involves influencing the product roadmap through customer feedback. The product suite includes an operational data platform, an AI-powered document intelligence layer on Snowflake, a raw material variability and genealogy analytics product, and a GxP-grade AI agent for shop-floor decision-making. The company has received awards, established global distribution partnerships, and has major pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturers as reference customers. The company fosters a high-ownership, high-autonomy environment with opportunities for accelerated professional development. Occasional travel (twice annually) to customer sites in North America and Europe is expected, though most work is remote.

Requirements

6+ years of experience as a software engineer.
Recent experience with field deployments and shipping software inside customer environments.
Comfortable with Python, production-grade system design, and async patterns.
Experience shipping LLM-enabled features and products, familiar with prompt engineering, schema validation, and cost/latency optimization.
Experience deploying and operating AWS (or comparable) infrastructure with Terraform.
Fantastic command of English, comfortable presenting to executive stakeholders and pairing with hands-on engineers.
Practical handle on security and compliance constraints and considerations (SOC 2, HIPAA, GxP, or similar).
Comfortable working with fuzzy problems and have a high sense of ownership over your work.

Nice To Haves

Pharmaceutical, biotech, biopharma, or regulated manufacturing domain knowledge or an acute interest in learning about these domains.
Drawn to mission-driven work and the idea of helping make life-saving therapies more accessible.
Experience with document processing, OCR (AWS Textract, PaddleOCR), or production RAG systems.
Experience helping scale an enterprise B2B venture.

Responsibilities

Translate customer needs and pain points into actionable signals for the internal product and engineering teams, and merge the majority of what you build back into the main platform.
Own the platform deployment into enterprise pharma and manufacturing accounts from kickoff through go-live and ongoing stewardship, observability, alerting, and incident response.
Build connectors between customer systems and the platform, and adapt the workflow orchestration engine to customer-specific process requirements.
Configure and extend AI-powered document processing pipelines (LLM extraction, RAG, structured output validation) for customer document types against accuracy, latency, and cost acceptance criteria.
Navigate security reviews, SSO integrations, VPC configurations, and GxP/SOC 2/HIPAA compliance requirements alongside customer IT, data engineering, and operations teams.
Represent the company technically in customer meetings, workshops, and executive briefings, and create the technical documentation, runbooks, and integration guides.