Sr. Forward Deployed Engineer

Corteva Agriscience • Johnston, IA

21h

About The Position

At Corteva Agriscience, you will help us grow what’s next. No matter your role, you will be part of a team that is building the future of agriculture – leading breakthroughs in the innovation and application of science and technology that will better the lives of people all over the world and fuel the progress of humankind. Corteva is building an AI-Native Software Engineering operating model from the ground up — work designed around hybrid teams of humans and agents from day one. Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) are how we make that real. You embed with internal business partners — Finance, R&D, seed production, commercial, G&A — learn their work better than they expect an engineer to, and ship the software that compresses weeks of effort into days. This is a software engineering role at its core. You build the right solution for the problem: web apps, services, integrations, data pipelines, internal tools — with agentic AI components when the problem calls for it. What sets the role apart is how you build: agentic AI is your force multiplier, and you ship production-quality solutions at a pace traditional engineering cannot match. You own outcomes end-to-end — discovery, design, build, deployment, measurement, and the long-term partnership that keeps the solution running and improving. Level is calibrated to experience, scope, autonomy, and engagement complexity.

Requirements

• Track record of shipping production software end-to-end. You write code — and direct agents to write code — that other engineers want to inherit.
• Full-stack range across front-end, back-end, APIs, data, and cloud.
• Strong instincts on architecture and trade-offs; solid operational practices (observability, testing, CI/CD).
• You build with agentic AI, not around it. AI coding tools are part of how you work every day, and you ship faster and at higher quality because of it.
• Hands-on building agentic components when warranted: modern LLMs, tool use, retrieval, multi-step workflows, evals, and guardrails.
• Sharp judgment about when to use AI and when not to.
• You sit with a finance lead, a procurement director, or a seed-production manager and earn trust quickly. You ask sharp questions and listen.
• Translate fluently between business outcomes and technical decisions — P&L impact, cycle time, throughput, and risk are first-class concerns.
• Comfort with ambiguity: walk into an undefined problem, leave with a sharp problem statement, baseline, and plan.
• Prior experience as a Senior level engineer, Solutions Architect, or other senior level engineering role.
• Background in agriculture, seed production, seed product development, biotechnology, or other broad scale enterprise G&A function.

Responsibilities

• Partner with Sr. Forward Deployed Engineers to deliver solutions to the business while learning the critical aspects to operate independently as a FDE.
• Embed with a business function as their forward-deployed partner.
• Build genuine fluency in their workflows, edge cases, and judgment calls — the things no spec captures.
• Frame the problem before reaching for a solution.
• Identify highest-leverage opportunities, set measurable baselines, and align on success before writing code.
• Build the right solution end-to-end: full-stack apps, services, integrations, pipelines, automations.
• Add agentic AI components — multi-step workflows, tool use, retrieval, evals, guardrails — when the problem calls for it, and not when it doesn’t.
• Ship to production and stay engaged as a long-term partner. The function should grow more capable over time with you alongside them — durable impact, not a clean exit.
• Conduct and supervise agents by default. If you find yourself writing most of the code yourself, you are doing it wrong. Your leverage comes from orchestrating multiple agents in parallel, reviewing their output critically, and steering them toward production-quality results.
• Make learnings compound across the FDE group. Every engagement produces patterns, components, and lessons the next FDE inherits — we get sharper as a team with each problem we solve.
• Promote common needs into Corteva’s shared platform. When the same problem shows up across functions — auth, evals, agent orchestration, data access, observability — turn it into reusable infrastructure so the next FDE does not rebuild it.
• Help shape the FDE practice itself — recruiting bar, engagement playbooks, technical standards, and mentorship — and take on the most ambiguous, highest-stakes engagements as your scope grows.

Benefits

• Numerous development opportunities offered to build your skills
• Be part of a company with a higher purpose and contribute to making the world a better place
• Health benefits for you and your family on your first day of employment
• Four weeks of paid time off and two weeks of well-being pay per year, plus paid holidays
• Excellent parental leave which includes a minimum of 16 weeks for mother and father
• Future planning with our competitive retirement savings plan and tuition reimbursement program

What This Job Offers

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