Forward Deployed Engineer

Role: Forward Deployed Engineer - Automotive AI

Location: San Mateo, CA

Compensation: up to $220k base (depending on experience)

Harrison Clarke are partnered with a well-funded AI company building an agentic AI system designed to operate as a teammate inside engineering organizations - not a tool, but an AI agent that works alongside human engineers using the same complex engineering tools they use. The company recently closed a $50M Series A from a top-tier VC and is backed by luminaries from leading AI labs. They are preparing to launch with new automotive customers and need a Forward Deployed Engineer to lead that deployment.

Role Requirements:

• Serve as the technical lead for customer deployments, making key decisions on architecture, data integrations, and user experience
• Lead discovery sessions with customer engineering teams, translate their challenges into AI use cases, and design how the product integrates into their workflows
• Build end-to-end AI solutions, take them into production, and provide post-deployment support to ensure customer success
• Connect the AI system to customer engineering data sources and tools, iterating until it delivers measurable value
• Identify, collect, and prepare customer data to fine-tune models; source evaluation criteria from customer sessions to validate improved capability
• Diagnose and resolve critical issues in live deployments; drive root-cause analysis and implement durable improvements
• Collaborate closely with internal AI specialists to develop novel systems capable of executing critical customer engineering tasks

Profile Signals:

• A physical engineering background in automotive, aerospace, mechanical, electrical, or similar. You understand how engineering organizations operate from the inside
• Experience shipping data-driven or AI systems to production. Python experience strongly preferred
• Comfortable working directly with customers and technical leaders. You've run technical discovery, built trust with enterprise teams, and translated problems into solutions
• Have integrated or extended AI systems in production. Bonus points for engineering or scientific domains
• Can rapidly build integrations between disparate customer systems
• Delivered solutions in secure enterprise environments
• Experience with live production troubleshooting and customer incident response
• Prior experience at an automotive OEM, supplier, or adjacent industry is a strong plus

Ideal Background:

• Started as an engineer in a physical domain (automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, robotics)
• Transitioned into software, AI, or technical implementation
• Has held customer-facing technical roles like FDE, solutions engineer, consulting engineer, or similar
• Understands agentic AI systems, RAG, model fine-tuning, or production ML workflows

If you're a technical builder who speaks both engineering and AI, and you're excited about deploying an AI agent into real-world engineering workflows at a major automotive company, apply below!