Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

forgevista•Chicago, IL

4d•$180,000 - $250,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Forward Deployed Engineer will run client engagements end to end, setting the technical and delivery strategy, ensuring customer success, and developing the skills of surrounding engineers. This role involves daily hands-on work in the CLI and ownership of the entire engagement's outcome. The position is remote-first, with travel requirements determined by each client, ranging from fully remote to approximately 25-50% on-site. The company culture emphasizes shipping with AI daily, living in the CLI, and operating with high agency.

Requirements

5-8 years of experience spanning business operations and AI-powered delivery.
A track record of leading engagements or deployments end to end.
Deep CLI fluency; ability to pair with AI agents and build reproducible workflows by default.
Ability to scope ambiguous problems, set acceptance criteria, and ship solutions that are adopted.
Experience leveling up other team members, formally or informally.
Executive presence: ability to present to C-suite executives and debug a pipeline within the same day.
Demonstrated ability to lead an engagement, including handling situations that did not go as planned and implementing changes.

Nice To Haves

Possession of personal frameworks or patterns for recurring deployment challenges.
Experience establishing a delivery pod (strategist + builders + AI agents) for 1-2 high-leverage use cases.

Responsibilities

Lead discovery with client operators and executives to map real workflows and identify areas for AI impact.
Architect multi-workstream deployment plans and define measurable success criteria.
Build evaluation frameworks to prove system effectiveness against client-verifiable acceptance criteria.
Unblock other engineers by pairing in the CLI and transforming fixes into reusable patterns.
Conduct executive reviews using business terms such as hours saved, error rates, and adoption.
Codify deployment patterns into playbooks for future engagements.