Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Description

A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) embeds directly inside a strategic enterprise customer to design, build, deploy, and run AI-powered production systems alongside the customer's engineering team. FDEs write production-grade software and own outcomes end-to-end, from prototype through enterprise-scale deployment combining the technical rigor of an AWS SDE with the urgency and ownership required to deliver measurable customer business outcomes. They create reusable architectures, patterns, and engineering mechanisms that scale the entire FDE practice.

Key job responsibilities
• Embed within customer engineering teams. Understand the customer's business processes, technical architecture, and operational constraints. Translate ambiguous business problems into scalable AI-enabled production systems. Requires 30 – 50% travel.
• Build production AI applications. Design and develop production-grade software powering AI and agentic workflows — orchestration layers for multi-agent systems, retrieval pipelines, workflow automation, decision intelligence. Integrate foundation models, customer data sources, APIs, and existing applications into cohesive AI experiences. Optimize for latency, reliability, observability, cost, and security.
• Own production. Take systems from design through production rollout and operationalization. Troubleshoot production incidents across AI models, distributed systems, data pipelines, and application services. Put in place monitoring, evaluations, guardrails, and the operational mechanisms (testing, CI/CD, rollback, resiliency) that keep AI systems healthy at scale.
• Accelerate customer transformation. Identify opportunities to expand AI adoption across customer workflows. Codify reusable patterns, accelerators, and reference architectures that benefit future customers and feed back into AWS.
• Raise the bar. Mentor engineers. Contribute to AWS engineering best practices for AI and forward deployment. Push reusable components and learnings back into AWS products and services.


About the team
ABOUT AWS:
 
Diverse Experiences
Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.
 
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We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud. 

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Basic Qualifications

- 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
- 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team
- Experience communicating technical concepts to non-technical audiences
- Experience leading agentic and spec-driven development at production scale (developing AI agents a plus)
- Experience with AI tools: eval frameworks, agent tooling, RAG pipelines, and prompt engineering

Preferred Qualifications

- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
- Experience working with AWS Services
- Experience with one of the following programming languages: Python, Ruby, Node.js, C#, or C++
- 3+ years of agile software development methodology experience
- Experience building or deploying AI/ML applications at enterprise production scale
- Background as a founder, engineering lead, or startup builder with high ownership and urgency
- Experience architecting and delivering complex, multi-component systems in customer production environments
- Experience leading customer-facing technical projects or managing external stakeholder relationships

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.