Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

About This Opportunity

We are representing a well-capitalized stealth holding company that acquires and operates software businesses in mission-critical, often overlooked industries. Our client is rebuilding these systems as AI-native platforms from the ground up—not research projects, but production environments with real customers, revenue, and P&Ls.

This is a founding-level role for an AI engineer who will own the technical buildout across the portfolio. You'll spend 90% of your time building and 10% managing AI talent across operating companies. If that ratio excites you rather than concerns you, read on.

Responsibilities

• Ship a working domain-specific agent into a live customer environment within your first 30 days
• Build industry-specific AI reasoning layers that encode the domain expertise of each vertical in the portfolio
• Embed AI-native functionality directly into core systems—not bolt-on chatbots, but actual workflow replacement with agents that perform the work
• Migrate legacy system datasets into new AI-native platforms, focusing on core workflow transformation
• Create repeatable playbooks, model stacks, evaluation harnesses, and infrastructure that every new portfolio company can inherit on day one
• Build evaluation infrastructure to measure whether agents are actually replacing human workflows with quantifiable metrics
• Fine-tune, distill, or route across frontier and open models based on the economics of each specific vertical
• Conduct forward-deployed work: visit customer sites, observe their workflows, instrument processes, and rebuild systems based on real-world understanding
• Manage and mentor AI engineers embedded at subsidiary companies as a player-coach

What We're Looking For

• Builder-first mentality with a track record of shipping production systems that people actually use—either independently or as the clear technical lead
• Forward-deployed engineering experience: willingness to travel to customer sites, work in their offices, and understand business operations before writing code
• Exceptional technical productivity and demonstrated ability to deliver outsized impact
• Strong, defensible opinions on when to fine-tune vs. prompt vs. RAG vs. agent vs. harness approaches, backed by data and production experience
• Production experience building with current frontier AI models (Claude, GPT, Gemini, open-source models)—not just experimentation in notebooks
• Comfort with ambiguity, small teams, unglamorous industries, and minimal process
• Preference for shipping over presenting; daily hands-on coding rather than slide decks and meetings
• Independence and self-direction: you don't need roadmaps handed to you or large teams to be productive

This role is not: a research position, a primarily managerial role, or a hands-off "Head of AI" title. You will be in the codebase every day, building production systems.

How We Work With You

When you apply through Get A Job.ai, our recruiting team will conduct an initial screening to understand your background and fit for this confidential opportunity. If there's mutual interest, we will submit your profile to our client for consideration. Please do not attempt to contact the client directly, as all communication flows through our talent team to protect both candidate and client confidentiality during the search process.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process based on experience and qualifications.

Equal Employment Opportunity: Get A Job.ai is committed to building diverse and inclusive candidate pools. We encourage applications from all qualified individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic. If you're excited about this role but don't meet 100% of the qualifications listed, we still encourage you to apply.