Forward deployed
engineer

Promise & Proof is an applied AI consulting and implementation firm in New York. We find where frontier AI belongs in a business, ship it to production, and tie the result to the P&L. We are a senior team of operators and forward deployed engineers who have run data and AI inside global enterprises and built it hands-on in startups. We work in any industry, including across private equity portfolios; our published case studies come from media, streaming, sport, and ad tech.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will work inside our clients’ teams to scope, build, and ship production AI systems against their real data and workflows. You will turn a scoped brief into a working system in a one to six week window, measure it against success criteria agreed before the first line of code, and stay through rollout until it is used. What you learn becomes a reusable reference implementation for the next engagement.

• Build production applications on frontier models inside client systems: RAG pipelines, evaluation harnesses, and agentic and MCP workflows
• Work with the business sponsor and engagement lead to turn a discovery workshop into a scoped, build-ready brief
• Set the technical standard on your builds: orchestration, evaluation, and vector store choices, and what stays in house versus goes to a partner
• Measure quality with evaluation harnesses built on the client’s own cases, and report progress against revenue, margin, hours reclaimed, and adoption
• Stay through rollout and hand-off, and train the client team to own what you built
• Document repeatable patterns as reference implementations and playbooks, so the second deployment costs a fraction of the first
• Work in person with clients and the team in New York at least 25% of the time, more when an engagement needs it

• Have 4+ years of experience building production software, including time in a technical, customer-facing role
• Have shipped LLM applications to production: prompt design, retrieval, agents, evaluation, and deployment at scale
• Write strong Python, and are comfortable across the stack when a build needs it
• Can explain technical trade-offs to executives, and change course when the evidence says so
• Are energized by unfamiliar data, unfamiliar workflows, and a deadline
• Care whether what you ship is used, not only whether it works

• Experience across more than one industry, and the range to learn a new business fast
• Experience building MCP servers, multi-step agents, or evaluation frameworks
• Experience running retrieval and vector databases at production scale
• Experience with AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure data and ML platforms
• Experience as a founder or early engineer at a startup

None. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

Education requirements: we require at least a bachelor’s degree in a related field, or an equivalent combination of education, training, and experience.

Location-based hybrid policy: We expect everyone to be in person in New York, with the team or at client sites, at least 25% of the time. Some engagements require more.

Visa sponsorship: we are not able to sponsor visas for this role at this time.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet every qualification listed. Strong candidates rarely check every box, and people from underrepresented groups are more likely to rule themselves out too early. If the work excites you, apply.

We are small on purpose. The people who scope the work are the people who build it, and success is defined before the first line of code: revenue, margin, hours reclaimed, adoption. We build with whichever frontier model fits the job, and every win becomes a playbook, so what you learn on one engagement compounds on the next.

Competitive compensation and benefits, generous vacation and parental leave, and flexible working hours.

We only contact candidates from @promiseandproof.com addresses, and we never ask for payment or financial details at any stage of hiring.

Promise & Proof is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.