Principal Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
About the role
The Principal Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is the senior-most hands-on engineer in the field deployment of TP.ai FAB solutions. This is a deeply technical individual-contributor role — approximately 80% direct hands-on engineering work, reading and writing production code, building and debugging integrations, and resolving deployment issues personally, with the remainder spent setting technical direction and raising the standard of the engineers around them. This is not a people-management role: it carries no direct reports and is accountable for technical outcomes, not headcount. Delivery is achieved within the product's supported extension points, and the role is expected to hold that line technically in day-to-day delivery decisions.
What you will do
- Conduct on-site discovery sessions and lead technical solution shaping with senior client stakeholders, translating outcomes directly into working code and configuration
- Personally configure and customise FAB applications within the product's supported extension points, and build and iterate prototypes hands-on during pilot phases
- Design and validate integrations, APIs, and workflows connecting FAB services with client systems
- Deploy FAB AI and digital components in live environments, and build data pipelines, model guardrails, monitoring, and LLM observability to a standard other engineers can reuse
- Take direct ownership of the hardest technical problems in the field, including real-time voice and audio pipeline debugging, and act as the deepest technical escalation point across concurrent deployments
- Review the code and configuration produced by other Forward Deployed Engineers, and raise engineering standards through code review, pairing, and worked examples
- Build reusable deployment assets, integration templates, and tooling that reduce the effort of every subsequent deployment
- Assess the technical feasibility, effort, and risk of client customization requests, grounded in direct knowledge of the codebase
- Work with Security, Compliance, and Data teams on responsible AI implementation at the level of actual deployment configuration
- Train end-users, track success metrics, and feed insights from real deployments back into FAB's product roadmap
What we are looking for
- Minimum 7 years of experience in software, solutions, or integration engineering, with a current, unbroken record of hands-on engineering — candidates who have moved primarily into management are not a fit
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field; advanced certifications in Cloud, Data Engineering, or AI Solution Delivery preferred
- Demonstrated technical depth across complex enterprise deployments, with personal ownership of the code and integrations delivered
- Ability to work at code level across an unfamiliar codebase — read it, debug it, extend it through supported interfaces, and reason about it under production conditions
- Hands-on production experience with GenAI/LLM systems — RAG, prompt engineering, and agentic or orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph or LangChain (equivalent frameworks accepted)
- Multi-cloud and cloud-migration experience, and hands-on experience with speech and real-time audio pipelines (STT, noise cancellation, virtual audio devices)
- Deep command of APIs, microservices, containers, and integration patterns, demonstrated by systems personally built, plus production experience with DevOps/MLOps, CI/CD, and Kubernetes
- Experience raising the technical level of other engineers through code review, pairing, and technical example rather than line management
- Leads through technical credibility and worked examples rather than positional authority; motivated by solving hard problems directly
Why this role is different
You will hold the deepest technical mandate in the field organisation — code-level ownership of the hardest deployment problems, without the trade-off of moving into people management.
The team
You will work within TP.ai's Forward Deployed Engineering practice as its most senior individual contributor, setting technical patterns that Senior and mid-level FDEs across the team build on.