Forward Deployed Engineer (Washington, D.C)

• TribalScale is looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to work at the intersection of software engineering, artificial intelligence, product development, and client delivery
• In this role, you will embed with client and internal teams to understand complex business problems, rapidly design solutions, and deploy production-quality software in real-world environments. You will operate as both a hands-on engineer and a trusted technical partner—translating business needs into working products while helping clients make sound technology decisions
• You will be expected to understand more than models and prompts. You will help design the systems around AI models: the harnesses, agent loops, state graphs, tools, context, evaluations, observability, permissions, and human controls required to make AI applications useful and reliable in production
• Partner directly with clients to understand their objectives, workflows, technical environments, data, and operational constraints
• Translate ambiguous business challenges into clear technical requirements, solution architectures, prototypes, and delivery plans
• Design and build AI-enabled applications, agentic workflows, developer tools, APIs, data pipelines, and full-stack products
• Engineer the harnesses around AI models, including prompts, tools, context, memory, permissions, runtime controls, observability, and feedback mechanisms
• Build and refine agent loops that support planning, tool selection, execution, observation, reflection, recovery, and termination
• Model complex workflows as graphs, state machines, or other orchestration patterns that coordinate models, tools, data, systems, and human approvals
• Create evaluation frameworks that measure task completion, accuracy, reliability, safety, latency, cost, and user value
• Develop rapid prototypes and proofs of concept, validate them with real users and representative evaluations, and evolve successful ideas into secure, scalable products
• Integrate solutions with client systems, enterprise data sources, cloud platforms, and third-party services
• Work across the technology stack, contributing wherever needed—from user interfaces and backend services to AI infrastructure, data workflows, and deployment pipelines
• Implement appropriate safeguards, permission boundaries, approval steps, and fallbacks for autonomous and semi-autonomous systems
• Instrument AI applications so teams can inspect traces, understand intermediate states, diagnose failures, and improve system performance
• Identify and address failure modes such as hallucinations, looping, brittle tool calls, context loss, prompt injection, non-deterministic behavior, and unsafe actions
• Troubleshoot complex technical and operational issues in client environments
• Communicate technical decisions, risks, trade-offs, and progress clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Collaborate with product managers, designers, engineers, data specialists, security teams, and client stakeholders throughout the delivery lifecycle
• Establish strong engineering practices, including automated testing, documentation, observability, security, and continuous delivery
• Capture reusable patterns, components, and insights that strengthen TribalScale’s engineering capabilities and future client engagements
• Support technical discovery, solution demonstrations, workshops, and pre-sales conversations when needed
• In your first few months, you will have built trusted relationships with client and TribalScale teams, developed a strong understanding of the client’s operating environment, and contributed working software to a meaningful business challenge
• As you grow in the role, you will:
• Turn loosely defined client needs into clear, executable technical plans
• Deliver AI-enabled products that perform reliably outside of controlled demonstrations
• Establish evaluation and observability practices that make quality measurable and regressions visible
• Improve agent behavior by refining harnesses, loops, tools, graphs, context, and safeguards—not only by changing prompts or models
• Help client teams understand what their AI systems can do, where they can fail, and how they should be operated responsibly
• Create reusable technical patterns that accelerate future TribalScale engagements
• Become a trusted partner who can navigate uncertainty, solve difficult technical problems, and help promising ideas reach production
• Work on high-impact challenges across industries and technology domains
• Build real products and production systems—not just recommendations or presentations
• Work directly with clients and see the impact of your decisions
• Explore emerging approaches to AI, agentic systems, product development, and software delivery
• Collaborate with multidisciplinary teams that value experimentation and continuous learning
• Influence both client outcomes and TribalScale’s evolving technical practices
• Join an environment where ownership, diverse perspectives, and thoughtful innovation are encouraged

Benefits

• Health Insurance: Health, dental, vision, life insurance
• Professional Development: Weekly Lunch & Learns, subsidies on courses and workshops to help you upskill
• Conferences & Events: Constant opportunity to attend conferences and events, tickets on us
• Socials: Friday socials, group hangouts, themed parties, quarterly events!
• Flexible Work Schedule: Ability to fit work into your personal schedule
• Parental Leave: Paid parental leave for moms and dads
• Fitness Perk: Subsidized corporate membership of Class Pass offering an array of classes; Goodlife corporate gym membership which offers 30% discount as well as sign-up fees waived
• Mental Health Perk: Subsidized online therapy sessions and resources with Inkblot
• Long Weekend Perk: The option for extra long weekends to spend with your family & friends
• Take your birthday off: Go ahead, celebrate!
• Inward Strong Partnership: TribalScale has sponsored an Inward Strong platform membership for all our Tribe members
• Vet Perks: 4 Virtual Vet Appointments annually for your Furry Friends

• You thrive in challenging environments where innovation is key. Your passion for technology is matched only by your drive to redefine its limits. You seek more than a job; you seek a calling—a chance to make a lasting impact on the digital landscape
• This role is ideal for an adaptable engineer who enjoys direct customer interaction, can move comfortably between discovery and delivery, and wants to see their work create immediate, measurable impact
• A practical understanding of harness engineering: designing the infrastructure, context, tools, permissions, controls, and feedback mechanisms that enable AI agents to operate reliably
• Experience instrumenting AI systems to trace decisions, inspect intermediate states, measure quality, and diagnose failures
• Ability to quickly understand unfamiliar systems, technologies, and business domains
• Ability to travel occasionally for client workshops or on-site delivery, where required
• Experience building or working with agent loops, including planning, tool selection, execution, observation, reflection, recovery, and termination
• Familiarity with graph-based orchestration, state machines, and multi-step workflows for coordinating agents, tools, data, and human approvals
• A high degree of ownership, curiosity, empathy, and bias toward action
• Strong knowledge of APIs, distributed systems, databases, cloud infrastructure, and modern software-development practices
• Experience collaborating directly with customers, stakeholders, or cross-functional delivery teams
• Understanding of the trade-offs involved in prompts, context management, memory, retrieval, tool use, structured outputs, and model selection
• Strong proficiency in Python, TypeScript, or another language commonly used to build AI applications, platforms, and developer tooling
• Ability to move from an ambiguous customer problem to a working prototype, validate it with real users and evaluations, and evolve it into a secure, maintainable production system
• Comfort working in fast-moving environments where requirements and technical constraints continue to evolve
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain AI-system behavior, limitations, risks, and technical trade-offs clearly
• Strong product judgment and the ability to balance model capability, reliability, latency, cost, security, and user experience
• Professional experience building and deploying production-grade software, ideally including AI-powered or agentic systems
• Experience designing evaluation systems for AI applications, including task-based benchmarks, regression suites, model-graded evaluations, human review, and production monitoring
• We recognize that strong candidates may not meet every qualification listed. If this role excites you and your experience is adjacent to what we have described, we encourage you to apply
• Experience with agent frameworks, workflow engines, coding agents, or custom model-orchestration systems
• Experience creating tool interfaces, execution sandboxes, permission models, and human-in-the-loop controls for autonomous or semi-autonomous systems
• Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector search, knowledge graphs, fine-tuning, and model-routing strategies
• Experience evaluating AI systems using golden datasets, simulators, adversarial testing, online experiments, and production feedback
• Familiarity with AI observability, including traces, token and cost analysis, latency measurement, failure classification, and quality dashboards
• Experience building systems that use multiple models or specialized agents to complete complex tasks
• Understanding of AI security concerns, including prompt injection, data leakage, excessive agency, insecure tool use, and supply-chain risks
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud
• Experience with containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD tooling
• Contributions to AI infrastructure, evaluation tooling, agent frameworks, or related open-source projects
• Experience working in regulated or complex enterprise environments
• Experience in consulting, professional services, solutions engineering, sales engineering, or another customer-facing technical role
• A history of taking products from initial discovery through production launch and ongoing adoption
• Claude Certified Architect - Foundations or Professional certification (or equivalent), with practical experience designing and implementing Claude-based AI solutions, agentic workflows, and enterprise integrations
• Experience with agentic AI and harness-driven development, including designing, building, and optimizing autonomous AI agents, multi-agent workflows, tool integrations, and agent harnesses that support reliable, scalable, and production-ready AI applications