Principal Forward Deployment Engineer

T-Mobile•Bellevue, WA

9d•$164,500 - $296,700•Onsite

About The Position

This role is the technical foundation the rest of T-Mobile's Forward Deployment Engineering practice builds on. As Principal Engineer, Forward Deployment, you set the technical direction for agentic AI delivery across every FDE domain, take on the hardest problems the practice encounters, and build the shared components and standards that let the rest of the team move faster. You lead through influence and technical credibility — not through a management chain — and your scope spans the entire FDE portfolio. You'll stay hands-on: writing and reviewing production code is core to the job. You'll also shape T-Mobile's broader AI direction alongside platform, data, and infrastructure leadership. Performance is measured on validated ROI across the FDE portfolio — not activity, tickets, or deployments shipped. This role reports to the Senior Manager or Senior Director, Agentic Automation & FDE. Success looks like an FDE practice that ships faster because of the foundations you built, makes better technical decisions because of the standards you set, and takes on harder problems because you've already cleared the way. If you want to help bring agentic AI to T-Mobile in a way that's fast, reliable, and built to last — we'd like to hear from you.

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, or related technical field. Master’s Degree preferred. Relevant equivalent experience accepted. (Required)
7-10+ years production engineering experience, including 3+ years deploying LLM-based systems in production and 2+ years delivering agentic or multi-agent systems. Track record of AI solutions that measurably improved a business outcome. (Required)
Demonstrated experience setting technical direction for a team or practice: defining standards others follow, guiding the architecture of other engineers, and developing engineers. (Required)
Production Python Engineering (proficiency in Go, TypeScript, or Java).
LLM System Architecture (RAG, prompt engineering, agent orchestration, hallucination mitigation at scale)
Data Engineering & Integration
Cloud-Native Deployment & MLOps (AWS primary; Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, vector databases, observability)
Organizational Technical Leadership
Technical & Portfolio Judgment
Data Security & Privacy (CPNI, PII)
At least 18 years of age
Legally authorized to work in the United States

Nice To Haves

Prior experience in a solutions engineering, forward deployment, or embedded technical role at a high-growth AI or cloud company. Experience navigating stakeholder environments from frontline operators through C-suite. (Preferred)
Telecom Domain Experience (care, retail, billing, network operations, or supply chain)
Applied Machine Learning & Data Science
Conversational AI, Intelligent Automation, or RPA
Regulated Data Environments (CPNI, PII, PCI, or HIPAA)
Hiring & Technical Assessment Contribution
Depth across NLP, embeddings, transformer architectures, and foundation models

Responsibilities

Set the technical direction for agentic AI delivery across the practice, keeping the team well positioned as the model and tooling landscape evolves.
Establish the architectural approaches the practice builds on, and shape which problems are worth solving with agentic AI.
Drive delivery consistency across domains so quality holds regardless of who is deployed. Step in where engagements need senior technical help.
Build and maintain the shared technical foundations the rest of the team delivers on. Generalize what works in one domain so others can move faster.
Take on the most complex technical challenges the practice encounters, staying hands-on while keeping cost, performance, and reliability in view
Advise practice leadership on where delivery capacity is best applied and raise concerns early when expected return won't justify the effort.
Grow the technical capability of the FDE team. Review architecture and code across domains, calibrate standards among senior engineers, and partner with practice leadership on the technical bar for hiring and progression.
Build sound data handling, privacy, and security practices into the solutions the practice delivers, in line with T-Mobile data governance standards including CPNI and PII.