Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Clutch

1d•$158,000 - $210,000•Remote

About The Position

Clutch is hiring a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to take AI agents from sale through launch and early production at individual credit unions. Working as one of two engineers assigned to an agent, you will participate in discovery, build integrations to core banking and loan systems, develop and tune agent behavior, conduct live testing with credit union staff, and support the agent through go-live and its first weeks in production. You will travel to customer sites when needed, particularly for kickoffs, live testing, and go-lives, averaging roughly 20% travel with one- to two-week stretches. The role is based in the US and requires the ability to travel on short notice. This is a senior production engineering position, not a solutions or support role. You will contribute code to Clutch’s monorepo every week, including integrations, modules, and agents’ prompts, tools, and evaluations. You will make technical decisions in customer settings and own the results. Field experience should feed back into the product through reusable defaults, playbooks, and platform capabilities. The Agents team works closely with customers to build and launch initial agents; after an agent is established, AI Operations Managers coordinate implementation, configuration, and ongoing success at subsequent credit unions. The Agents team is a small, senior group that includes seven engineers, a dedicated AI product group, and AI sales specialists. Engineers work in pairs, with each pair typically covering conversation and LLM work alongside software and integrations, and a pod lead owning the product day to day. The team works asynchronously by default and uses on-site visits at specific implementation milestones. Its working style emphasizes clear written updates, evaluations and evidence, and business outcomes. In the first month, you are expected to ship a production change to a live agent, learn an agent and the Agents Platform end to end, join an implementation and live testing session, and identify opportunities to improve implementation processes. Within three months, you will own the technical side of a credit union implementation, run the agent evaluation and tuning process, complete at least two on-site visits, and contribute a reusable platform capability. Within six months, you will have taken a new agent from sale to its first live credit union, become a trusted technical contact for credit union staff, document an implementation playbook that AI Operations can use for later deployments, and contribute to the direction of future agents.

Requirements

At least 7 years of software engineering experience in a fast-paced environment; SaaS and/or fintech experience is preferred.
Senior TypeScript and Node.js backend experience in a large codebase, including experience with NestJS, CQRS, schema-validated boundaries, and dependency injection.
Experience with integration and API engineering, including secure service-to-service endpoints, third-party APIs, and webhooks.
Ability to work patiently and effectively with legacy banking systems that were not designed for integration.
Sound security and authentication judgment, including OAuth and machine-to-machine authentication, tenant-scoped access, secrets handling, and avoiding PII in logs.
Ability to work directly with customer stakeholders, make and explain recommendations, say no when appropriate, and take ownership of decisions.
Ability to make deliberate code-quality and technical-debt decisions under deadline pressure.
Genuine interest in LLM agents, including evaluation discipline for nondeterministic systems, treating system prompts as code, and understanding which decisions must not be delegated to a model.
Based in the US and able to travel on short notice.

Nice To Haves

Experience with voice and telephony technologies such as LiveKit or Twilio.
Experience with Temporal or event-driven orchestration.
Python experience.
Experience integrating core banking or loan origination systems.
Credit union or banking domain knowledge.

Responsibilities

Build production code in Clutch’s monorepo, including integrations, platform modules, and agents’ prompts, tools, and evaluations.
Participate in customer discovery sessions and make technical recommendations to credit union stakeholders.
Build and maintain integrations with credit unions’ core banking and loan origination systems.
Author, configure, test, and tune AI agent behavior, including system prompts, tool contracts, orchestration triggers, and compliance gates.
Own the technical implementation of an agent at a credit union from kickoff through testing, go-live, and the first weeks of production.
Run live testing sessions with credit union staff and make technical decisions in customer settings.
Run evaluation and tuning loops using golden transcripts, rubric judges, and regression suites.
Travel to customer sites for implementation milestones, including kickoffs, testing, and go-lives.
Identify implementation bottlenecks and contribute defaults, tools, reusable capabilities, and product decisions to the Agents Platform.
Create implementation playbooks so AI Operations can manage subsequent deployments.
Work with the engineer paired on the agent, the pod lead, product managers, AI Operations, and the platform team.