Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Job Title: Staff Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Company: Cadre AI

Location: San Diego, CA

Work Arrangement: Flexible hybrid

Salary: $165,000 - $225,000

Employment: Full-time

Equity: Competitive equity

Job Description

Cadre AI is looking for a Staff Forward Deployed AI Engineer to serve as the technical backbone of its San Diego engineering team. This is a hybrid role for an engineer who can build complex production AI systems while confidently working with executive-level clients and mentoring other engineers.

Responsibilities

• Build and own end-to-end production AI systems across a diverse client portfolio, including voice agents, RAG pipelines, LLM orchestration, Salesforce integrations, and automation.

• Join client calls with solutions leaders and translate complex technical solutions for C-level stakeholders.

• Lead technical discussions and keep client engagements on track under pressure.

• Mentor and coach existing Forward Deployed Engineers.

• Review engineering work and help develop the team’s technical and client-facing capabilities.

• Partner with the Head of Engineering on architecture, engineering processes, and technical standards.

• Triage and delegate technical builds across the team.

• Take ownership of the most complex client problems and drive solutions from design through production.

Requirements

• 5-10 years of experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer or customer-facing software engineer.

• Experience designing and building client-facing AI systems in production.

• Strong experience with agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, document processing, automation, and LLM orchestration.

• Strong software engineering skills and experience building end-to-end production systems.

• At least 1 year of experience formally mentoring or managing engineers.

• Experience building voice agents tied to measurable business outcomes.

• Production cloud deployment experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a STEM field.

• Strong communication and executive-level client engagement skills.

• High agency, low ego, and comfort working in ambiguous environments.

• Based in San Diego, CA, or willing to commute from Orange County, Temecula, or Riverside.

Preferred Technologies

Python, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI API, LLM Orchestration, RAG, Agentic Workflows, Vector Search, Embeddings, Prompt Engineering, AWS, GCP, Azure, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Voice Agents, Salesforce Integrations.