[Hiring] Forward Deployed Engineer (AI) @NextLink Labs

Role Description

NextLink Labs is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to join our growing AI practice. You'll work directly with clients on the design, build-out, and roll-out of production AI systems, collaborating closely with an AI Architect and focusing on the robust data infrastructure that makes AI applications work in the real world, using tools like Airflow, Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks.

As a "forward deployed" engineer, you'll sit close to the customer's problem:

• Discovering use cases
• Prototyping rapidly
• Hardening what works
• Shipping it into the client's environment

Your time will be spent on hands-on engineering, delivering:

• ETL/ELT pipelines for AI-powered applications
• RAG pipelines
• Agentic workflows
• The supporting cloud infrastructure

This role has a strong consultative dimension and is distinct from pure backend development or pure research positions.

Qualifications

• 3–5 years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 1 year shipping AI/ML or LLM-based features to production
• Strong Python skills; comfort with at least one of TypeScript/JavaScript, Go, or Java for integration work
• Hands-on experience building applications with modern LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, etc.)
• Background with data engineering tooling such as dbt, Airflow, Dagster, Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks
• Working knowledge of RAG patterns, embedding models, and at least one vector store (pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, OpenSearch, etc.)
• Solid grasp of one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including how to deploy containerized services and manage secrets/IAM
• Experience writing tests, instrumenting code, and reasoning about observability, including for non-deterministic systems
• Strong written and verbal English; comfortable presenting technical work to client engineering teams and non-technical stakeholders
• Customer-facing instincts: you ask good questions, manage ambiguity well, and don't disappear when a problem gets messy

Requirements

• Prior experience in a consulting, agency, or forward-deployed/solutions-engineering role
• Experience with agent frameworks (Claude Agent SDK, AWS Strands, etc.) and MCP (Model Context Protocol)
• Familiarity with prompt engineering, evals frameworks, and structured-output techniques
• Infrastructure-as-Code experience (Terraform, Pulumi, CDK) and CI/CD pipelines
• Exposure to regulated industries (financial services, healthcare) and the data-handling practices they require
• Contributions to open-source AI tooling or technical writing/speaking on applied AI topics

Benefits

• We're a technical consulting firm that values clarity, ownership, and outcomes
• Remote-first, with a strong written communication culture (docs, async updates, clear PRs)
• Investment in your growth, including access to LLM playgrounds, an internal AI guild, and senior architects to learn from
• The opportunity to build something big and exciting at the frontier of applied AI

Location & Employment Type

• Remote, LATAM
• Long-term independent contractor
• Significant overlap with US Eastern Time (ET) required