[Hiring] Forward Deployed Staff - Growth @Levelup Labs

Role Description

As Forward Deployed Staff - Growth, you'll drive how LevelUp Labs reaches and engages the market. This is a hands-on growth role—you'll create content, manage community, build partnerships, and support sales. Like all Forward Deployed roles, you're a generalist who does whatever it takes to move the needle.

The "Forward Deployed" Philosophy:

• Everyone at LevelUp Labs is a generalist.
• You'll be expected to contribute across growth, content, community, and even support client engagements when needed.
• This role has a spike in growth and go-to-market.
• You're someone who understands how to build an audience, create compelling content, and drive pipeline.
• Technically literate enough to work with our AI-focused clients.

What "spike" means:

• You can contribute across all areas, but your edge is in understanding what makes people pay attention, engage, and convert.
• You think in funnels, content loops, and distribution.
• You'll manage the content creation flywheel—from idea to published piece to engagement.

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.

Qualifications

• 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).

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• 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.