Lead Forward Deployed Engineer, AI

h2o.ai • Dallas, TX

12d • Hybrid

About The Position

Founded in 2012, H2O.ai is on a mission to democratize AI. As the world’s leading agentic AI company, H2O.ai converges Generative and Predictive AI to help enterprises and public sector agencies develop purpose-built GenAI applications on their private data. With a focus on Sovereign AI—secure, compliant, and infrastructure-flexible deployments—H2O.ai delivers solutions that align with the highest standards of data privacy and control.

Our open-source technology is trusted by over 20,000 organizations worldwide, including more than half of the Fortune 500. H2O.ai powers AI transformation for companies like AT&T, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Chipotle, Workday, Progressive Insurance, and NIH.

H2O.ai partners include NVIDIA, Dell Technologies, Deloitte, Ernst & Young (EY), Snowflake, AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), VAST Data and MinIO. H2O.ai’s AI for Good program supports nonprofit groups, foundations, and communities in advancing education, healthcare, and environmental conservation. With a vibrant community of 2 million data scientists worldwide, H2O.ai aims to co-create valuable AI applications for all users.

H2O.ai has raised 256 million from investors, including Commonwealth Bank, NVIDIA, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Capital One, Nexus Ventures and New York Life.

For more information, visit www.h2o.ai.
The Opportunity
We are looking for a Senior AI Engineer who builds things that matter. You will design and ship end-to-end AI solutions for some of APAC's most complex enterprise problems - spanning agentic AI systems, LLM applications, and production ML pipelines. This is a hands-on engineering role embedded within a customer-facing field team, meaning your work will be seen, used, and evaluated by real enterprises from day one.
You will work alongside Kaggle Grandmasters, ML engineers, and domain experts to deliver AI that goes beyond demos - into production, into workflows, and into measurable business outcomes.

Requirements

• 3+ years of hands-on AI/ML engineering experience, including end-to-end model development and production deployment.
• Demonstrable experience building LLM-powered applications - RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, fine-tuned models, or similar.
• Strong Python engineering skills; experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn) and LLM tooling (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or equivalent).
• Experience deploying models and AI services in cloud or enterprise environments (AWS, Azure, GCP, on-prem Kubernetes).
• Deep understanding of modern GenAI concepts: prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, RLHF, model evaluation, guardrails, and LLMOps.
• Solid grounding in classical ML - able to select the right tool for the problem, not just default to the latest LLM.
• Backend development skills: REST APIs, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines for AI applications.
• Strong problem-solving instincts - comfortable with ambiguity, able to move fast without sacrificing engineering quality.
• Clear communicator who can explain complex AI systems to non-technical stakeholders without oversimplifying.

Nice To Haves

• Kaggle or competitive ML experience.
• Familiarity with H2O.ai products, Wave, or H2O Document AI.
• Experience in financial services, healthcare, or other regulated industry AI deployments.
• Exposure to tabular foundation models, AutoML, or enterprise ML platforms.
• Prior experience in a customer-facing or field engineering role.

Responsibilities

• Design and build agentic AI systems and multi-agent frameworks that automate complex, multi-step workflows for enterprise customers.
• Develop and deploy LLM-powered applications using techniques including RAG, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, function calling, and tool use.
• Implement guardrails, evaluation frameworks, and responsible AI controls to ensure production-grade reliability and safety.
• Stay current with the rapidly evolving agentic AI landscape - MCP, LLM orchestration frameworks, reasoning models - and bring the best of it into customer engagements.
• Own the full development lifecycle: from problem framing and data exploration through model development, API integration, and production deployment.
• Build scalable backend services and APIs that expose AI capabilities to enterprise applications and workflows.
• Integrate AI models into customer environments - cloud, on-prem, and hybrid - ensuring performance, stability, and maintainability at scale.
• Develop ML pipelines and LLMOps infrastructure that support continuous model improvement and monitoring in production.
• Work directly with customer data scientists, engineers, and business stakeholders to translate real-world problems into AI solutions.
• Contribute to pre-sales and proof-of-concept engagements - building fast, credible demonstrations that win technical trust.
• Communicate clearly across audiences: from detailed technical design reviews with engineering teams to outcome-focused updates for business stakeholders.
• Collaborate closely with Program Managers, Solution Engineers, and Kaggle Grandmasters to deliver cohesive, high-quality solutions.

Benefits

• Remote-friendly culture with a flexible, high-trust working environment.
• Market-competitive total rewards package.
• Clear pathways for growth into senior technical leadership, architecture, or research roles.
• Mission-driven company building AI for Good.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed