Forward Deployed Engineer

DEPARTMENT Engineering LOCATION Minneapolis, MN (Hybrid) TYPE Full time REPORTS TO CTO THE ROLE Enterprises come to Blank Metal to get production AI live. That work is led by senior people who can sit across from a client's executives, diagnose the real problem, and then go build the thing that fixes it. As a Forward Deployed Engineer you'll turn advisory conversations into shipped software, closing the gap between a promising demo and a system that runs in production, where most enterprise AI initiatives stall. You embed with a client, earn trust at the executive level, and stay hands-on from the first scoping session through the live deployment. You are equal parts technical leader and trusted advisor: you shape what gets built, you build it with a lean team of AI engineers, and you own whether it actually works in production. The playbook for this practice is still being written, and you will write a lot of it: how we embed, how we prove value, and what we bring back from each engagement. Forward deployed means what it says. Expect roughly 25 to 40% travel to client sites, heavier during kickoffs and go-lives. The rest of the time you work wherever you work best. This is a senior, high-autonomy role with real ownership: you carry a small number of accounts deeply, and you are measured on outcomes clients can see. WHAT YOU GET TO DO Set the conditions Partner with [... source excerpt omitted ...] ctually be built Build it for real Deploy alongside a lean team of AI engineers and own the architecture, the hard calls, and the code that ships Deliver the concrete artifacts clients run in production: MCP servers, sub-agents, agent skills, and the pipelines around them Work across the full stack and the model layer Navigate real enterprise environments: the client's IT systems, security constraints, and the stakeholders who own them Own the outcome Stand behind results with observability and evals the client can check for themselves Win over the people who use the system day to day; a deployment succeeds when they rely on it Carry accounts end-to-end: some weeks are [... source excerpt omitted ...] WHAT WILL HELP YOU SUCCEED Typically 7+ years building and shipping software, including real time as a technical leader who executives actually trusted A track record of owning production systems end-to-end, from first commit through live operation You have shipped LLM-powered systems to production: agents, retrieval, evals, and the judgment to know when each is the wrong tool Strong hands-on skills in Python and TypeScript or JavaScript, and comfort picking up whatever the client's stack demands You have built or maintained eval frameworks that showed whether a system actually worked You can hold your own with a CTO in the morning and be in the codebase in the afternoon At