Level

Vercel

Forward-Deployed Engineer 

Vercel is hiring a Forward-Deployed Engineer  in San Francisco, United States. It pays $137k-$207k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Vercel.

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 OpenAI and AI agents.
  • Level classifies it as a senior role.
  • Level lists 94 other open roles at Vercel.

AI in this role

openai
ai-agents

About Vercel:

Vercel is the agentic infrastructure company, freeing people and agents to ship what's next. For more than a decade we've helped builders move from idea to production with speed, security, and exceptional developer experience.

Now we're scaling our products for both agents and people to ship and run software, built in the open and trusted by OpenAI, PayPal, Ramp, Supreme, and millions of developers worldwide.

About the role

As a Senior Forward-Deployed Engineer on the Professional Services team, you will embed with developer teams at strategic enterprise customers to lead frontend migrations, performance work, and production AI builds. Success looks like production code live in customer environments, customer teams able to extend it on their own, and a wider partnership with each account. This is a remote role open to candidates in the US, with occasional travel to customer sites.

What you'll do

  • Build production AI agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and agentic workflows with the AI SDK and the eve framework inside customer environments
  • Lead migrations of legacy React, Vue, and other frontends to Next.js, including Pages Router to App Router, and automate the repeatable steps
  • Audit customer codebases for performance bottlenecks and architectural anti-patterns, then deliver roadmaps with measurable improvements, including answer engine optimization (AEO) and search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Architect and ship high-performance Next.js applications with App Router, Server Components, streaming, and incremental static regeneration (ISR)
  • Run workshops and pair programming sessions so customer teams can maintain what you ship, and share repeatable patterns with Product and Engineering

What you need

  • 6+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years in a customer-facing technical role (consulting, solutions architecture, forward-deployed engineering, or technical founder)
  • Shipped production TypeScript applications on Next.js and React, including a legacy-to-Next.js migration, or built and deployed production LLM agents with human-in-the-loop patterns and sandboxed execution
  • Built and deployed web applications, backend systems, or agentic workflows using AI coding tools such as harnesses, skills, and MCP servers
  • Presented technical discovery findings and proposals to executives at enterprise customers, and mentored other engineers

Bonus if you

  • Led an enterprise AI initiative that replaced a manual process or legacy system with a production agent
  • Diagnosed and fixed Core Web Vitals issues (Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, Interaction to Next Paint) at scale
  • Contributed to Next.js, React, or the AI SDK, or maintain a popular related library

The San Francisco, CA base pay range for this role is $137,000.00 - $207,000.00.  This salary range is an estimate. Actual salary will be based on job related skills, experience and location. Pay ranges outside San Francisco may be  adjusted based on employee location.  The total compensation package also includes benefits and equity-based compensation. Your recruiter can share more about the specific pay range for your location during the hiring process.

Disclosures:

  • Privacy: Please review our Job Applicant Privacy Policy for more information on how we handle your data.
  • Equal Opportunity: Vercel is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Vercel encourages everyone to apply for our available positions, even if they don't necessarily check every box on the job description.

How we rate this

Forward-Deployed Engineer  at Vercel 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.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ 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

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI agentsOpenAI

Also common in forward deployed engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$137k
Typical forward deployed engineer job
$182k

This posting starts 25% below the typical forward deployed engineer job. See forward deployed engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  2. Walk me through how you've used OpenAI in your day-to-day work.
  3. Describe a typical day in a role like this one: which parts run through AI directly?
  4. 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 and OpenAI. 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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