Forward Deployed Engineer

# Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) — Australia & New Zealand **Balncs is recruiting a Forward Deployed Engineer on behalf of our client**, an applied AI and technology services company with expertise in cloud, data and engineering. This role brings together hands-on software engineering, practical AI implementation and close collaboration with customer teams. You’ll work directly with organisations to understand their challenges, build solutions and take them from early prototypes into production. ## The opportunity You’ll work at the intersection of engineering and business operations, turning complex requirements into software that solves real problems. Your work could span building AI-powered applications, connecting enterprise data, integrating existing systems and developing agentic workflows. You’ll own delivery from discovery through deployment, staying close to users to understand what works and what needs to improve. Working alongside solution architects, engineers and delivery leaders, you’ll help establish reusable patterns while adapting solutions to the needs of each engagement. ## What you’ll do - Work directly with customer teams to understand workflows, identify problems and define measurable outcomes. - Translate ambiguous requirements into technical designs, prototypes and production applications. - Build and deploy AI-powered solutions, including LLM applications, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic workflows. - Develop APIs, integrations and data pipelines that connect solutions to enterprise systems. - Own implementation across the stack, from backend services and data processing to user-facing interfaces. - Evaluate model performance and solution quality using relevant datasets, testing and user feedback. - Implement safeguards for AI systems, including access controls, validation, human review and failure handling. - Ensure solutions meet expectations for security, reliability, observability, performance and cost. - Troubleshoot production issues and improve solutions based on real-world usage. - Explain technical decisions and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders. - Collaborate with distributed engineering teams and provide documentation and knowledge transfer. - Turn successful implementations into reusable components, tools and delivery patterns. ## What you’ll bring - Strong software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping and supporting production applications. - Proficiency in Python, TypeScript or JavaScript, with the ability to work across different parts of a technology stack. - Experience building APIs, integrating third-party systems and working with relational or non-relational databases. - Practical experience with cloud platforms, ideally AWS, including deployment, security and monitoring. - Experience building with LLMs or generative AI, including an understanding of retrieval, tool use, evaluation and model limitations. - Strong debugging skills and the ability to work through unfamiliar systems and incomplete requirements. - A practical approach to engineering, balancing speed with maintainability and production readiness. - Confidence working directly with customers, running technical discussions and demonstrating working solutions. - Ownership of outcomes, including testing, deployment, documentation and ongoing improvement. - Sound judgement about when AI adds value and when a simpler software solution is more appropriate. ## Desirable experience - Previous experience in forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, technical consulting or a product-focused engineering role. - Experience with Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker or comparable AI platforms. - Familiarity with vector databases, search systems and document processing pipelines. - Experience developing agentic systems with tool calling, orchestration and human approval workflows. - Experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD and containerised deployments. - Exposure to enterprise identity, data governance and security requirements. - Experience working with distributed teams or in regulated industries. ## Apply through Balncs If you enjoy working closely with people, solving unfamiliar problems and turning ideas into production software, we’d welcome a conversation. **Apply through Balncs to learn more about this opportunity.**