Hire a Forward Deployed AI Engineer
The FDE for AI products. We find engineers who get LLM apps, agents and evals working on a customer's real data, and who can explain plainly what the model can't do.
Interviewing is free, and every hire comes with a 90-day replacement guarantee.
What a Forward Deployed AI Engineer does day to day
Get a working agent or retrieval pipeline running on customer data in days.
Build evals so the customer can see quality improve over time.
Take the prototype to production with guardrails, monitoring and cost controls.
Explain model limits in plain language before they turn into escalations.
Why hire your Forward Deployed AI Engineer through us
Tested on the work and the customer
Every candidate passes a skills test for this role and a live role-play built around your own customer before they reach your interviews.
Run by a working FDE
Asher Cohen works as a Forward Deployed Engineer and is on every search. He knows which interview answers hold up once someone is on site with a real customer.
A short list with scorecards
You get a small set of candidates, each with a written scorecard from our tests. If we don't think someone would hold up in front of your customer, we don't send them.
Signs you need one
- Customers love the demo but stall when it meets their data.
- Nobody on your team owns evals for customer deployments.
- Your ML engineers are buried in customer-specific tuning.
- Every pilot turns into a research project.
What great looks like
- Has shipped LLM features that real users rely on.
- Builds an eval before arguing about which approach is better.
- Can explain hallucinations to a non-technical buyer without losing them.
- Knows when a prompt change will do and when the pipeline needs rebuilding.
Running the interviews yourself?
Our hiring playbook has the scorecard, the customer role-play script and the interview questions we use on every candidate. You're welcome to use them in your own process.
Sample job description
A first draft to paste into your applicant tracking system and edit to fit your team.
About the role. You'll help customers get real value from [product]'s AI capabilities, on their data and in their workflows.
You'll build agents, retrieval pipelines and evals for customer use cases, and take them from prototype to production.
You have [3+] years writing production code and hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered features.
Questions about hiring a Forward Deployed AI Engineer
Anything we haven't covered? Start a search and ask us on the first call, or email us at hello@embedhire.com.
Interviewing is free, and every hire comes with a 90-day replacement guarantee.
Do they need an ML research background?
Rarely. Most of the job is engineering and judgment around models: retrieval, evals, guardrails and explaining the limits to a customer. Training models is a different job. We look for people who have shipped LLM features to real users.
How do you test AI skills?
For AI roles, the technical screen is a single task. The candidate gets messy customer documents and a retrieval pipeline that gives wrong answers. They have to find out why, write a small eval that proves it and then fix it. We score whether they measure the problem before they start changing prompts, because a demo on clean data tells you very little.
Is this different from a regular FDE?
They need the same customer instincts plus hands-on LLM experience. A regular FDE wires your product into the customer's systems. An AI FDE also has to make a model behave on the customer's data and prove it with evals. If you sell an LLM app or an agent, this is the FDE you want.
How long does it take to hire a Forward Deployed AI Engineer?
Your first vetted shortlist arrives in under 5 days from kickoff. Everyone on it has passed our skills test and a role-play built around your customer. We aim to get you to a signed offer in 3–4 weeks. What usually decides the timeline is how quickly your team can run final interviews, so we take care of the scheduling to keep the search moving.
How do you vet candidates for this role?
We run two tests before you meet anyone. The first is a skills test for this role. For engineering roles that's a technical screen where they write working code against a messy API, and for strategists it's a business case. The second is a live role-play built around your own customer, which we design with you when we scope the role. You get a written scorecard for every candidate, and your team runs the final interviews.
Is it really free to interview?
Yes. You can meet everyone on your shortlist without committing to anything. If nobody clears your bar, we keep searching. Every hire comes with our 90-day replacement guarantee.
Will you push us to hire someone?
No. If a candidate does well on the skills test but struggles with the customer, we tell you, even if that means going back out to search. Any concerns we have go on the scorecard in writing. We'd rather you wait an extra week than hire the wrong person.
What if the hire doesn't work out?
If your hire leaves or isn't working out in the first 90 days, we find you a replacement. We run the search again using what we learned the first time, and every new candidate goes through the same tests.
See your first Forward Deployed AI Engineer candidates in under 5 days
Interviewing is free, and every hire comes with a 90-day replacement guarantee.