Senior Associate - Forward Deployed Engineer

New York Life•New York, NY

2d•$124,000 - $177,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Forward Deployed Engineer is a highly experienced engineer embedded with strategic transformation teams, accountable for the technical realization of complex, high-value business outcomes. The role combines hands-on engineering, systems design, rapid prototyping, architecture judgment, AI-assisted development, and direct engagement with business and technology leaders. Senior Forward Deployed Engineers operate with substantial autonomy. They take validated product intent, prototypes, implementation specifications, and enterprise architecture patterns and determine how to engineer scalable, secure, production-ready solutions. They are expected to use AI as a core engineering capability while exercising expert judgment over system decomposition, generated code, integration, testing, controls, performance, and operational readiness. You will work as part of small, outcome-focused teams alongside Product Owners, business and domain experts, architects, data specialists, engineers, control partners and other Technology colleagues. Teams operate through an agentic software development lifecycle: rapidly prototype to validate product intent, translate that learning into precise implementation specifications, and use AI engineering agents to accelerate design, code generation, testing, documentation and iterative refinement. As an engineer, your role increasingly shifts from manually executing every development task to orchestrating and directing agentic engineering workflows—providing the right context and specifications, evaluating generated solutions, making engineering tradeoffs, integrating components, resolving ambiguity and maintaining accountability for quality, security, controls and production outcomes. The model combines rapid learning and AI-driven development leverage with strong human engineering judgment and enterprise production disciplines. As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, you will also provide technical leadership within these teams, guiding complex engineering decisions, mentoring other engineers and helping maintain technical coherence from prototype through production.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field with 8+ years of relevant experience; a Master’s degree with 6+ years of relevant experience; or equivalent practical experience.
Agentic Engineering Leadership - Demonstrated ability to orchestrate AI engineering agents across complex software development, including work decomposition, specification design, generated-code review, validation and integration into production systems.
Deep hands-on engineering capability and strong systems-design judgment across modern application architectures, APIs, integration, cloud, data, security, and operational concerns.
Demonstrated experience leading technical delivery from ambiguous business problem through production implementation.
Experience making architecture and engineering tradeoffs across multiple systems and organizational boundaries.
Strong production engineering discipline spanning automated testing, CI/CD, observability, resiliency, performance, security, and supportability.
Demonstrated hands-on experience applying generative AI, AI-assisted engineering and/or agentic development approaches to software delivery, with the technical depth and learning agility to evaluate and adopt rapidly evolving engineering patterns.
Demonstrated ability to influence architects, engineers, product leaders, business stakeholders, and strategic partners without relying solely on formal authority.
Strong communication, mentoring, and technical leadership skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience building production-scale generative AI or agentic applications and platforms.
Experience in financial services, insurance, finance, investments, or another regulated enterprise environment.
Experience in forward-deployed engineering, consulting engineering, startup, or high-autonomy product engineering environments.
Experience establishing reusable engineering patterns or leading modernization of software delivery practices.
Experience in financial services, insurance, Finance/FP&A, investments, or another complex regulated enterprise environment.

Responsibilities

Own technical realization for complex outcome areas, from prototype and specification through architecture, build, integration, production deployment, and ongoing improvement.
Translate ambiguous or evolving product intent into pragmatic technical designs while partnering with Forward Deployed Analysts to close specification gaps quickly.
Lead system decomposition and make consequential engineering tradeoffs across applications, APIs, data, agents, cloud platforms, security, performance, and operational requirements.
Lead agentic software development workflows for complex solutions, determining how work should be decomposed across AI engineering agents and human engineers and establishing the specifications, context, constraints and validation approaches needed to produce high-quality outcomes.
Review and govern AI-generated designs and code, applying senior engineering judgment to architecture, system decomposition, integration, security, performance, controls and production readiness.
Design and build AI-enabled and agentic capabilities using enterprise-approved patterns for orchestration, tool use, retrieval, memory where appropriate, human oversight, evaluation, observability, identity, and controls.
Partner with Solution Engineering & Architecture and Data Architecture to validate difficult architectural hypotheses and translate reference patterns into production implementations.
Guide strategic partner engineers and other pod engineers, review critical designs and code, and ensure technical coherence across the solution.
Establish automated testing, deployment, observability, resiliency, security, and production-readiness practices appropriate to the solution.
Help evolve reusable patterns and practices for specification-driven and agentic software development across outcome teams, enabling engineers to achieve greater development leverage without compromising engineering quality or accountability.
Mentor engineers and help evolve the forward-deployed engineering model, including specification-driven and AI-assisted software development practices.