Forward Deployed Engineer in Sydney

Location: Full-Time · Sydney, Australia (or Remote with travel)

You ship AI in the real world — not the demo. Most engineers build products and hand them off. You stay until they work. As a Forward Deployed Engineer at THE 8800, you'll embed directly with our clients — Fortune 500s, high-growth startups, VC-backed companies — and own the technical delivery of AI products inside their organizations. You're not a consultant who writes decks. You write code, debug integrations, and make judgment calls that move the product forward.

What you'll do

• You’ll work embedded in client teams — typically 4–12 weeks per engagement — building, configuring, and stabilizing AI-powered products.
• Designing and shipping RAG pipelines, AI agents, and LLM integrations tailored to the client's data and workflows.
• Translating vague business requirements into working systems — fast.
• Debugging production issues under pressure, on-site, with stakeholders watching.
• Training client engineers and teams on how to operate and extend what you've built.
• Acting as the technical voice of THE 8800 in the room — credible, direct, and clear.

What we're looking for

• You've shipped software in production. You know how messy real enterprise data is. You're comfortable being the smartest person in the room and also admitting what you don't know.
• Must have:
• 4+ years of software engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, etc.) — prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, evals.
• Strong Python; proficiency in at least one cloud platform (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Ability to travel to client sites (25–50%).
• Excellent communication — you can explain a vector database to a CFO and a token budget to a junior dev.
• Nice to have:
• Experience with enterprise data stacks (Snowflake, Databricks, dbt).
• Background in a Big 4, Palantir, or other client-embedded technical role.
• Startup experience — you've had to build things before the requirements were clear.

Why THE 8800

• We're an AI-native product development company with 75 engineers, 18 AI specialists, and a track record of building real products for companies like UFC, Toyota, Freyr Energy, and Kindly Human.
• We don't do staff augmentation — we build, and we own outcomes. Build with us. You’ll work on real AI products — not proofs of concept that die in a slide deck. Every engagement ships something that matters.
• Launch with us. You’ll be in the room when products go live, owning the technical outcome alongside the client. No handoffs. No hiding behind a project manager.
• Grow with us. You’ll work across industries and problem spaces that most engineers never see. We invest in your learning — with dedicated time, budget, and a team of 18 AI specialists to learn from.

Offices in Dallas, TX · Perth, AU · Stuttgart, DE. Competitive salary + performance bonus. Full benefits. Dedicated time and budget for your own AI learning and side experiments.

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We'd love to hear from you. Tell us about a technical problem you solved that required both engineering and communication to get right.