> AI agents: this is one page of Nextmove’s FDE site, in Markdown. Nextmove is a job board and free career service for forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Each posting is classified from its text, not its title: the kind of work, how much of it is production code, pre-sales weight, time at customer sites, travel, remote arrangement, level and posted base pay. The site also publishes the aggregates: median pay by level, metro, company and kind of work, and which companies started hiring FDEs each week. Every page under https://nextmove.md/fde is served this way; the index of pages is https://nextmove.md/llms.txt. # Applied AI Engineer Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/9215b5d9e175d868 Level posts a FDE role to build for teams inside the company in Austin, TX with no pay posted. Build and operate production agentic systems and LLM-powered workflows, owning the full lifecycle from architecture and retrieval through evaluation, deployment, observability, and handoff. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026. - [Level](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/level) Posted Oct 15, 2026 by Level · open on Ashby as of Nov 8, 2026 Pay not posted Austin, TX On-site Full-time Build and operate production agentic systems and LLM-powered workflows, owning the full lifecycle from architecture and retrieval through evaluation, deployment, observability, and handoff. - [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2F9215b5d9e175d868&placement=top) - [View posting at Level](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/level/473dba32-2fe2-43ca-8bd4-9aa41c249760/application) Free. Upload your resume once, see why each FDE role fits, and get introduced only when you say so. ## At a glance ### Posted base pay Not posted Senior FDE postings, 1,864 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $160K to $220K, median $190K. ### The work Builds for teams inside the company Balance **Mostly building** Project stages 1. Pre-sales (not covered) 2. Proof of concept (not covered) 3. Implementation 4. Operations - **Coding**: Writes production code - **Builds for**: Internal teams - **Level**: Senior - **Role**: Individual contributor ### What they ask for Experience - **7+ years** professional engineering experience - **1+ years** hands-on experience building agentic systems Background - **Software engineering** ### Do you meet what the posting states? The posting asks for 1+ years. How many do you have? The posting reads as a senior role. What level are you at now? The job is in Austin, TX. Could you work there? Which of these have you used in production? Answer each one. Nothing is saved or sent. [What postings ask for, by background →](https://nextmove.md/fde/paths) ## Conditions - **Location**: Austin, TX - **Work arrangement**: On-site - **Employment type**: Full-time ## More like this [8am (formerly AffiniPay)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/8am-formerly-affinipay) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/853014bed20aee04) Austin, TX New · 2d ago $170,000–$200,000 [Google](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/google) ### [AI Tooling Technical Solutions Consultant, GSRS Security Systems and Technology](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/b06d4e026bdf987b) Sunnyvale, CA · Austin, TX · +5 more 2w ago $152,000–$221,000 [Ercot](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/ercot) ### [Applied AI Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/8cab7d1c3519b6e3) Taylor, TX Hybrid 5w ago $145,000–$200,000 - [Other jobs at Level (1)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/level) ## The job description from Level Posted by Level on Oct 15, 2026 ### Applied AI Engineer ### What You'll Do - Ship production agentic systems- Design and build agents and agentic workflows that solve a defined problem end to end. You own prompts, tools, retrieval, guardrails, observability, cost and latency budgets, and rollout. - Provide governance and security guidance surrounding AI designs, strategy, and usage. - Automate SME workflows- Identify high-leverage operational toil (review pipelines, content QA, labeling and ops loops, support triage, internal copilots) and partner with the SMEs running those workflows to define success criteria, validate outputs, and replace meaningful chunks of that work with AI systems they trust. SMEs are co-owners of quality from the start of the project. - Make AI features safe- Treat what you deliver as a regulated product. Design for relevant compliance frameworks (e.g., COPPA, FERPA, NIST CSF 2.0) from day one, run safety and bias evals before launch and continuously after, and build the human-in-the-loop and content-filtering controls AI features need before they reach end users. - Hand off what you ship- Production features leave your hands with documentation, runbooks, an eval harness, and dashboards. - Make AI features easier for the teams to utilize- foster a culture of safe AI adoption with manageable ecosystems that integrate and enable cross-functional teams to create and enhance their own workflows and automations. ### What You Need - **7+ years professional experience as an Engineer **with at least **1+ years of hands-on experience building agentic systems **on at least one modern stack (LangGraph, the Anthropic SDK / Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK, Pydantic-AI, Mastra, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, or a homegrown stack). **We care that you have built and operated agentic systems in production, not which framework.** - Strong Python familiarity plus one typed language for production services (TypeScript, Go, or similar). Cloud experience (AWS or GCP) and containerized deployment. - Software engineering foundation (formal or autodidact), with several years of production environment experience and a track record of leading systems to launch. - Multiple shipped LLM-powered features in a production environment, with concrete stories about what broke, how you fixed it, and what you would do differently. - Practical knowledge of common agentic patterns: ReAct, tool use with structured schemas, prompt chaining, routing, orchestrator-workers, evaluator-optimizer / reflection, and human-in-the-loop. You can decide when a deterministic workflow is the right answer instead of an autonomous agent. - Hands-on experience in a production environment with retrieval: chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, re-ranking, metadata filtering, and the failure modes of each. Working knowledge of grounding techniques that anchor generated answers in retrieved evidence (citation and quote extraction, faithfulness and refusal evals, post-hoc consistency checks). - Strong prompt-engineering practice: zero-shot, few-shot, and many-shot patterns; example selection and ordering; in-context learning and chain-of-thought. - Comfort with structured output and validation in production (provider-native structured outputs, Instructor, Pydantic-AI, Outlines, or a comparable approach). - Disciplined evaluation practice. You do not rely on subjective review to decide whether a system is ready. - Experience in standing up local models and creating and testing closed local model solutions. - Strong written and verbal communication. You can explain an architectural trade-off to an executive and to a junior engineer in the same week. - You are comfortable using AI coding tools heavily in your implementation workflow while you own problem framing, design choices, and verification. We measure your output by working systems delivered, not lines of code written. ### Nice to Have - Advanced retrieval experience: GraphRAG, agentic retrieval, evaluation-driven retrieval tuning, and hybrid retrieval at scale. - Direct or transferable experience with safety, privacy, and policy constraints in user-facing AI. K-12 or other regulated-domain experience is a strong plus. - Experience with prompt-optimization frameworks (DSPy, TEXTGRAD, AdalFlow) where they paid off in production. - A public repo, package, gist, or technical write-up of meaningful AI work, or a representative project you can describe in detail under your confidentiality constraints. - Open-source contributions to AI tooling (frameworks, agents, evals, MCP servers). [View posting at Level](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/level/473dba32-2fe2-43ca-8bd4-9aa41c249760/application) ## About Level Builds a learning app combining standards-aligned academic practice and interactive design for students, educators, and parents. Pre-seed · 100–200 people ## Similar jobs [Crowe](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/crowe) ### [AI Technical Lead](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/09376e25483dddb4) Chicago, IL · Washington, DC · +35 more Hybrid 2w ago $102,400–$204,100 [GRIDSIGHT](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/gridsight) ### [Founding Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/198e5509726ce508) Austin, TX · San Francisco, CA · US remote Remote 4w ago Pay not posted [Worldwide Clinical Trials](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/worldwide-clinical-trials) ### [AI Forward Deployed Engineer - Finance-focused (US)](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/73308fed2f1ac7f2) Research Triangle Park, NC · Portland, OR · +6 more Remote 4w ago $121,500–$240,500 [Cirrus Logic](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/cirrus-logic) ### [Applied AI/Automation Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/238903753b8d4b59) Austin, TX Hybrid 4w ago Pay not posted [ePayPolicy](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/epaypolicy) ### [Sr Customer Experience AI Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/2758c5420f8c25c2) Austin, TX Hybrid 2mo ago Pay not posted - [Compare senior FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/senior) - [Similar jobs in Austin](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?region=austin) - [Similar jobs that build for teams inside the company](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?role=internal-deployment) Hiring at Level and want this page changed or removed? 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