Forward Deployed AI Engineer | San Diego, CA

About Cadre AI Cadre AI is an AI strategy and integration firm that builds production AI systems for B2B companies in private equity, wholesale lending, real estate, and SaaS. We don’t build decks about what AI could do. We ship systems that move revenue, compress costs, and automate the work that used to take entire teams. The Role The Forward Deployed AI Engineer is a critical role at Cadre AI. You are the person in the room with the client, the person writing the code, and the person architecting the system. There is no handoff between “strategy” and “execution.” You own both. You will embed directly with our clients to understand their operations, identify the highest-leverage AI opportunities, and then build and ship production systems that deliver measurable results. One week you might be designing an LLM pipeline that processes financial documents. The next, you’re standing up a voice agent for a construction company or building a revenue operations engine for a hardware manufacturer scaling globally. This role is AI-first in how you work, not just what you build. You use Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and whatever tools let you ship quality code at a pace that would be impossible without them. Speed and quality are not tradeoffs here. They’re both the expectation. What You’ll Do Own Client Delivery End-to-End Embed with clients across private equity, lending, real [... source excerpt omitted ...] tecture, scope the work, and then build it yourself Present to C-suite stakeholders, translating complex trade-offs into clear decisions with measurable expected outcomes Manage client relationships as a trusted technical partner, not a vendor. Clients should feel like you’re part of their team Build and Ship Production AI Systems Architect and deploy LLM/RAG pipelines, agent orchestration systems, conversational AI, document intelligence, and predictive analytics Use AI-native development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) to write, review, and iterate on production code at startup speed Build evaluation frameworks, regression suites, and observability layers that prove [... source excerpt omitted ...] e team Mentor junior engineers through pair programming, design reviews, and hands-on coaching Who You Are 3+ years building software, with 2+ years focused on AI/ML systems in production (not notebooks, not proofs-of-concept) You have shipped LLM-powered products to real users and understand the gap between a working demo and a reliable system Hands-on with modern LLMs, RAG architectures, agent frameworks, and prompt engineering. You have opinions about when to use each and you can defend them Fluent in Typescript & Python and comfortable across the stack (React/Next.js, PostgreSQL, cloud infrastructure). You can build a full application, not just a model Exceptional commun