Forward Deployed Engineer

AI in this role

ai-evaluation

Role Purpose

The Forward Deployed Engineer works directly with enterprise clients to design, deploy, and optimize GenAI data solutions, with full ownership of final delivered data quality. Embedded across engineering, data operations, and client delivery, this role ensures datasets, pipelines, workflows, and automations meet defined accuracy, reliability, and performance requirements for GenAI model development.

Your Impact

Act as a trusted consultative partner to clients by defining requirements, clarifying success criteria, shaping high-quality annotation guidelines, and proactively providing insights.
Influence the what and the why behind GenAI data solutions by translating ambiguous client needs into clear, scalable workflows.
Deliver GenAI datasets that meet all defined acceptance and quality criteria.
Define the validation and automation requirements that reduce variance, manual review effort, rework, and time to validation.
Partner with engineering to build requirements as scalable, reproducible, and observable pipelines.
Contribute reusable quality frameworks and validators adopted across multiple projects.

What You Bring

3+ years of experience in a customer-facing technical role such as solutions engineering, solutions architect, data or technical consulting, or data operations.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Experience working on GenAI, machine learning, or model evaluation data, including LLM training, annotation, or evaluation workflows.
A consultative problem-solving approach when leading client conversations, asking sharp questions, and guiding stakeholders toward better decisions.
Ability to vibe code but proficiency in Python and SQL is a plus
Confidence in working directly with client engineering or machine learning teams.

Location and Work Arrangement

This is a hybrid role based in San Francisco, CA. You will be required to work from our San Francisco office two days per week.

How we rate this

Forward Deployed Engineer at Appen rates 71 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.

Prepare for this job

A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI Evaluation

Questions you could be asked

How do you decide that one model's output is better than another's for a given task?
Describe a typical day in a role like this one: which parts run through AI directly?
If you removed AI from this role, what would be left, and how do you decide what still needs a human?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: AI Evaluation. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them — a tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project — this role expects it to be a running habit.

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