Forward Deployed Staff - Engineering

The Role

As Forward Deployed Staff - Engineering, you'll be embedded with client teams building production-grade AI systems. This is a hands-on engineering role where you'll design, build, and ship AI products and internal tools that solve real business problems.

The "Forward Deployed" Philosophy

Everyone at LevelUp Labs is a generalist. You'll be expected to contribute across engineering, training, and content when needed. However, this role has a spike in engineering and implementation—you're someone who loves building production systems, debugging hard problems, and shipping code that works at scale.

What "spike" means: You can teach and create content, but your edge is in building. You're the person others go to when the system is broken, when the architecture needs rethinking, or when something needs to actually ship.

What You'll Do

Build

Design and implement production-grade AI systems alongside client engineering teams

Build LLM-powered applications: RAG systems, agents, evaluation frameworks, etc.

Own technical architecture decisions and trade-offs

Write code that's maintainable, tested, documented, and built to last

Debug complex issues across the stack

Embed

Work directly with client engineering teams as a peer, not an outside consultant

Understand client constraints, existing systems, and organizational context

Communicate progress and challenges to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Transfer knowledge to client teams—leave them better than you found them

Learn & Share

Distill learnings from implementations into patterns we can reuse

Contribute to our courses, documentation, and internal tooling

Stay current with AI developments—evaluate what actually works in production

Participate in technical discussions and code reviews

What We're Looking For

Must Have

Engineering

2+ years building production software systems

Strong programming skills (Python required; experience with TypeScript/JavaScript, Go, or Rust a plus)

Deep experience with AI/ML systems: LLMs, RAG, agents, fine-tuning, evaluations

Strong understanding of software engineering best practices (testing, CI/CD, observability, documentation)

Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)

Production Mindset

You've shipped systems that handle real traffic and real users

You think about failure modes, edge cases, and operational concerns

You know the difference between demo code and production code

You've been paged at 2am and fixed something that was broken

Communication

Can explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders

Comfortable presenting architecture and progress to client leadership

Clear written communication (documentation, design docs, async updates)

Can work effectively with client teams across different cultures and timezones

Mindset

Self-directed—you don't need someone telling you what to do next

Comfortable with ambiguity and rapidly changing requirements

Ego-free

you'll do whatever needs doing to ship

Strong opinions, loosely held

Nice to Have

Experience with enterprise clients (understanding their constraints and pace)

Prior consulting or client-facing engineering experience

Contributions to open source projects

Background with observability and evaluation frameworks for AI

Experience leading technical projects or mentoring engineers

What You'll Get

Competitive compensation (base + performance bonuses + outcome-based bonus per engagement)

Work on challenging problems with leading companies

Learn from a team with 30+ enterprise implementations and published AI research

Flexibility

remote-first, async-friendly

Direct impact

you're building real systems, not maintaining legacy code

Growth

as an early team member, you'll shape our engineering culture

Originally posted on Himalayas