Forward Deployed Engineer
Singtel is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer in Singapore, Singapore. Level rates it ; you can apply on Singtel.
Level's read on this job
- Works on AI ●●●○ is how Level rates this forward deployed engineer role: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include Mistral, Deepseek and AI agents.
- Level lists 496 other open roles at Singtel.
AI in this role
About RE:AI
RE:AI is Singtel Digital InfraCo's sovereign AI platform — GPU-as-a-Service on NVIDIA infrastructure, a Model-as-a-Service catalog spanning open- and closed-weight models (Mistral, Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM and others), and a Token-as-a-Service layer that gives every application one governed gateway into that entire model catalog — unified API, policy-based routing, scoped credentials, spend controls, and a single audit trail, all running inside Singtel's sovereign Nxera data centres. Customers span government, financial services, healthcare, and enterprise across ASEAN, all of whom need to move from AI pilot to production without re-litigating security and compliance for every model or integration.
The role
We're building a customer-facing AI engineering function inside Customer Success to turn AI conversations into signed pilots. AI Engineers sit alongside prospective and existing customers — from the first exploratory meeting through to a live pilot — and are the technical reason a customer says yes.
The work spans two areas, and you will do both. Applied AI engineering: prototypes and custom demos, reference deployments and proofs-of-concept, GPU sizing and architecture, inference benchmarking and model fit. Business value engineering: TCO modelling and commercial structuring, tender and pre-sales support, CXO and strategic engagements, thought leadership and GTM. You will build, and you will build quickly — but what you build exists to win and shape a deal, not to run in production for three years. Production hardening and steady-state run sit with the AI infrastructure and production team. Roughly half this job is technical judgement and half is communication and commercial reasoning.
What you'll do
- Scope the opportunity. Work with Customer Success and Sales to understand a prospective customer's problem, workflow and constraints — then decide what to build that will move the deal forward.
- Build the prototype or custom demo that wins the deal. Stand up working prototypes, custom demos and reference deployments on RE:AI — agentic workflows, retrieval, tool use, guardrails — tuned to the customer's actual use case rather than a generic demo. Demonstrate them live wherever possible, not as a slide deck.
- Size the platform and prove the fit. GPU sizing and architecture, inference benchmarking, and model selection against the customer's latency, throughput and cost targets — and the ability to show your working when their architects ask how you arrived at the number.
- Support the pilot. Stay technically engaged as a proof-of-concept converts to a pilot: integration guidance, tuning, and being the escalation point the customer trusts — handing over to the AI infrastructure and production team for build and run once the decision is made.
- Build a reusable asset library. Patterns that show up across three customers should become a reusable demo, template or accelerator, not three bespoke builds. You'll be expected to spot that and push components back into shared pre-sale tooling.
- Be the technical face of RE:AI. Represent the platform credibly to customer engineers, architects and CXOs — explaining what you built, why, and what tradeoffs you made, in their language.
- Support tenders and formal pre-sales. Technical content for RFPs, government tenders and compliance responses — solution write-ups, architecture sections and clarification responses, working with bid and commercial teams to deadline.
- Model the commercial case. TCO modelling, token economics and commercial structuring — quantify what a solution costs to run on RE:AI and what it is worth against a public API or on-premise alternative, in terms a CFO would accept.
- Contribute to thought leadership and GTM. Reference architectures, customer-facing write-ups, webinars and conference material that make the next deal easier to open — plus internal enablement so Sales can carry the story without you in the room.
What we're looking for
- Genuinely customer-facing. You can run a technical conversation with a customer's engineers directly, hold your position under pushback, and read a room well enough to know when to go deeper and when to simplify. This is the single most important requirement.
- AI-native. You have personally built with LLMs and agents — tool-calling, retrieval, orchestration, prompting, evaluation — and you keep up with the field because you're interested in it. Certifications alone won't cover this.
- Excellent communicator, spoken and written. You can present to a mixed technical and executive audience, and write a clear proposal, tender response or follow-up that stands on its own. Your writing will be seen by customers.
- Commercial and value judgement. You think about business value, not just the software. You can build or reason about a TCO model, explain where cost sits and what drives it, and articulate why a customer should choose this — and you can say when the right answer is a smaller solution.
- Comfortable with ambiguity and travel. Every customer and every pilot is different. You'll define your own scope more often than you're handed one, and you're fine being on a plane or on-site when the deal needs it.
- Sound engineering fundamentals. Strong enough in at least one backend stack to build a credible prototype yourself, comfortable with APIs and cloud basics, and able to reason clearly about how a model behaves in production — latency, cost, failure modes. You don't need to have trained a model or run a production platform.
Nice to have
- Product management or product owner experience — the ability to frame a problem in terms of user value and business outcome.
- Full-stack capability, enough to make a prototype usable end to end without waiting for anyone.
- Experience responding to enterprise RFPs or public sector tenders, or building TCO and commercial models.
- Familiarity with GPU infrastructure, inference serving, or benchmarking model performance and cost.
- Prior forward-deployed, solutions-engineering, or startup generalist engineering experience.
- Experience in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, government) — understanding what "production-ready" means when compliance and data residency are non-negotiable.
- Experience with LLM gateways/routing layers, guardrail/policy systems, or building on top of an internal model-serving platform.
- A track record of turning one customer's build into a reusable pattern for the next three.
How we rate this
Forward Deployed Engineer at Singtel rates 77 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.
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. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
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Skills and AI tools this role asks for
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Pay
- Typical forward deployed engineer job
- $180k
This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical forward deployed engineer figure when pay comes up. See forward deployed engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- Walk me through how you've used Mistral in your day-to-day work.
- What are the limits of Deepseek that you've run into, and how did you work around them?
- 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 agents, Mistral, and Deepseek. 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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