Forward Deployed Engineer, AI Labs

Via•New York, NY

3d•$160,000 - $220,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Via is launching AI Labs, an incubator-style team operating like a startup within the company, to expand its reach and provide cutting-edge technical solutions to cities in areas beyond transit. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will be a founding member of this new team. This is an opportunity to get in at the ground floor of something new, with a dedicated space to move fast, experiment boldly, and build AI-powered products that could fundamentally change how Via and its partner cities operate. You will have autonomy, direct access to leadership, and the backing of a company at scale, without the usual constraints. This role is for individuals experienced in building AI products end-to-end in an environment with a blank canvas.

Requirements

5+ years of hands-on experience building full stack applications, with a track record of owning features end-to-end rather than working in isolation on models or research.
3+ years of working with AI tools and/or building AI powered products.
Deep expertise across the AI stack, including LLMs, predictive modelling, and the data infrastructure required to support them in real-world environments.
Strong backend engineering skills, comfortable designing scalable APIs, working with distributed systems, and writing clean, maintainable code.
Energized by ambiguity and early-stage environments; able to do great work without everything being defined and take ownership without being asked.
Communication skills to work cross-functionally.
Intellectual curiosity to keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI.
Thrive when working directly with users and customers.
Comfortable with travel to collaborate on-site.

Responsibilities

Build and ship production-grade AI products end-to-end, owning everything from problem framing and data pipeline design through to deployment and iteration in live environments.
Work closely with customers in a forward-deployed manner to deeply understand problems and constraints and iterate quickly on scalable agentic solutions.
Lead technical scoping workshops, directly interfacing with city leaders to solve challenging local problems with agentic workflows.
Work across a fast-moving and varied roadmap, contributing to intelligent tooling involving data consolidation, predictive modelling, real-time decision-making, and LLM-powered experiences.
Collaborate directly with product, data science, and operations teams to identify and prioritize the highest-impact AI opportunities across the business.
Write clean, scalable backend and frontend code that powers AI-driven features, designing APIs, managing data flows, and ensuring systems perform reliably at scale.
Help shape the technical culture of AI Labs from the ground up, contributing to how the team builds, reviews, ships, and iterates.
Stay close to the frontier of AI development and bring new ideas, tools, and approaches into the team proactively.