Forward Deployed Engineer in Canberra

About Accenture

Accenture is a leading solutions and services company that helps the world’s leading enterprises reinvent by building their digital core and unleashing the power of AI to create value at speed across the enterprise. Our strategy is to be the reinvention partner of choice for our clients and to be the most client-focused, AI-enabled, great place to work in the world.

What you’ll do

The most interesting engineering problems right now aren't just inside big tech companies, they're inside enterprises trying to figure out how AI actually fits into the way they work. As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll work directly with enterprise clients to change how their organisations operate by designing and shipping AI systems that deliver real outcomes. You'll own delivery end-to-end, from the first whiteboard session with a CTO to a production system handling real load. You'll work across the best available tooling (Claude, GPT, Gemini etc.) choosing what's right for the problem rather than defaulting to one stack. You'll design pipelines and agentic workflows that have to meet enterprise standards for security, scale, and reliability. You'll do this while mentoring engineers, shaping our internal practices, and becoming the kind of trusted advisor that clients build their AI roadmaps around.

This role suits someone who is equally at home in a technical deep-dive and a boardroom. Someone who finds half-solved problems energising. Someone who wants their work to be visible, consequential, and fast-moving.

Key responsibilities

• Strategic Client Leadership: Own the technical relationship with enterprise clients from initial discovery through to production, including C-suite engagement and long-term roadmap influence. Run workshops that identify and prioritise high-value AI use cases, translating business problems into concrete engineering plans.
• Solution Design & Delivery: Architect and ship enterprise-grade AI systems using the best available tooling (Claude, GPT, Gemini etc.) chosen for the problem, not the default. Design pipelines and agentic workflows that meet real enterprise requirements: security, scalability, cost efficiency, and reliability at production load. Integrate LLMs with complex enterprise data environments, including cloud platforms and data warehouses.
• Technical Leadership: Set the technical direction on engagements, making the hard calls on architecture, tooling, and trade-offs. Mentor engineers on both sides of the client relationship, raising the standard of the whole team. Lead incident resolution and complex troubleshooting.
• Governance & Operational Excellence: Define evaluation frameworks that assess model quality, safety, and business impact. Implement LLMOps practices including monitoring, observability, and drift detection in production environments. Ensure every deployment meets enterprise security and compliance requirements from day one.

Here’s what you need

Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, solutions architecture, or technical consulting
• 3+ years delivering AI/ML or LLM-based solutions in production
• Proven track record of leading complex, customer-facing technical engagements

Technical Skills:

• Programming & Engineering: You write production-quality code and have strong opinions about what that means. You're expert-level in at least one language and comfortable picking up others as the problem demands. You understand distributed systems and API design deeply enough to spot architectural risk early, and you've lived through enough incidents to know why observability and CI/CD hygiene matter.
• LLM & AI Platforms: You have hands‑on experience with Claude, GPT, and Gemini in production, not just demos. You understand the real trade‑offs between models: cost, latency, context limits, reasoning quality, and where each breaks down. You know prompt engineering beyond the basics, have built RAG pipelines that handle messy real‑world data, and have worked with agentic frameworks and MCP.
• Cloud & Data Technologies: You're strong on at least one major cloud platform (e.g. AWS, Azure, or GCP) and you understand how enterprise infrastructure constraints shape what you can actually deploy. You've worked with containerisation and orchestration in production environments, not just local Docker setups.
• Data Platforms: You're comfortable working across the data stack, whether that's Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or something bespoke. You know enough to integrate LLMs with complex data environments without needing a data engineer to translate for you.

Bonus points if with:

• Experience deploying AI solutions in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, or government
• Familiarity with responsible AI and model risk management frameworks
• Contributions to open‑source projects or technical publications
• Experience with evaluation and observability tools such as LangSmith, Promptfoo, or Weights & Biases
• Prior experience in a startup or high‑growth technology environment

Benefits of working at Accenture:

• 18 weeks paid parental leave
• Long & short‑term career break opportunities
• Structured career development program
• Local and international career opportunities
• Certified as a Family Inclusive Workplace
• Flexible Work Arrangements - centered around Accenture’s Truly Human ethos and our commitment to supporting the health and wellbeing of our people.

We are proud to be in the top 3 of last year’s Diversity & Inclusion Index! We are a WORK180 Endorsed Employer. All our consulting professionals receive comprehensive training covering business acumen, technical and professional skills development. You’ll also have opportunities to hone your functional skills and expertise in an area of specialization. We offer a variety of formal and informal training programs at every level to help you acquire and build specialized skills faster.

Equal Employment Opportunity

At Accenture, we recognise that our people are multi‑dimensional, and we create a work environment where all people feel like they can bring their authentic selves to work, every day. Our unwavering commitment to inclusion and diversity unleashes innovation and creates a culture where everyone feels they have equal opportunity.