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 explain what the model can't do.
Free to interview. 90-day replacement guarantee.
What a Forward Deployed AI Engineer Actually Does
Get a working agent or retrieval pipeline running on customer data in days.
Build evals so the customer can see quality improve, not just hear about it.
Take the prototype to production with guardrails, monitoring and cost controls.
Explain model limits in plain language before they become escalations.
Why Hire Your Forward Deployed AI Engineer Through Us
Vetted on Both Halves
Tested on the hands-on skills this role needs and in a live customer role-play. Nobody reaches your loop untested.
Run by a Former FDE
Asher Cohen, a former FDE who has sat in the customer's office at midnight, is on every search. He knows which interview answers fall apart on site.
A Shortlist, Not a Pile
Scorecards and role-play clips instead of a stack of resumes. If they'd lose the room, you never see 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 science project.
What Great Looks Like
- Has shipped LLM features to real users, not just notebooks.
- Reaches for evals before opinions.
- Explains hallucinations to a non-technical buyer without losing them.
- Knows when a prompt fix beats a pipeline rebuild.
Running the Interviews Yourself?
Our hiring playbook has the scorecard, the customer role-play script and the questions we use on every candidate. Take it and run our loop in yours.
Sample Job Description
A first draft you can paste into your applicant tracking system and make your own.
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.
Hiring a Forward Deployed AI Engineer: Your Questions
Still have questions? Talk to a former FDE, or email hello@forwarddeployedhiring.com.
Free to interview. 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, our technical screen is one task: messy customer documents and a retrieval pipeline that gives wrong answers. They find out why, write a small eval that proves it and fix it. We score whether they reach for measurement before they start tweaking prompts. Anyone can make a demo look good on clean data.
Is this different from a regular FDE?
Same customer instincts, plus hands-on LLM experience. A regular FDE wires your product into the customer's systems. An AI FDE also makes a model behave on the customer's data and proves 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. Every candidate on it has passed our core vetting and the role-play built around your customer. We aim to get you to a signed offer in 3–4 weeks. The biggest factor is how fast your team can run final interviews. We handle the scheduling around them so nothing stalls.
How do you vet candidates for this role?
Every candidate has passed our core vetting, run by us: a customer role-play plus a skills test built for this role. For engineering roles, that's a technical screen. For strategists, it's a business case. For your search, shortlisted candidates also run a short role-play built around your customer. You get a scorecard and a 3-minute clip, so you can judge for yourself. Your team runs the final interviews.
Is it really free to interview?
Yes. Meet every candidate on your shortlist with no commitment. If nobody clears your bar, we keep searching. Every hire is backed by our 90-day replacement guarantee.
Will you push us to hire someone?
No. If a candidate is strong on the skills test but struggles with the customer, we tell you, even if it means restarting the search. Our concerns go on every scorecard in writing. We'd rather you wait a week than make the wrong hire.
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 rerun the search with what we learned, vetted the same way, so the second shortlist is sharper than the first.
See Your First Forward Deployed AI Engineer Candidates in Under 5 Days
Free to interview. 90-day replacement guarantee.