Forward-Deployed Engineer

About Leon Capital Group

Leon Capital Group is a multi-billion-dollar holding company with operating businesses across healthcare, real estate, and financial services. Within the Financial Services Group (FSG), we are building an AI-native operating model from the ground up: a dedicated, full-lifecycle innovation function that identifies, designs, builds, delivers, and implements AI products across our portfolio companies.

About the Role

The Forward-Deployed Engineer will build everything a human or external system touches: the serving layer for the models, the human-in-the-loop decision surfaces, and the workbenches and copilots on top of our owned data. You turn captured judgment into decision support that a human acts on, then reuse that pattern rather than rebuilding it each time. The work is hands-on and close to the business: sitting with operators, scoping in context, shipping fast, and enabling adoption.

Early efforts lean on a purchased platform, so you start with integration and quick wins; as we stand up our own copilot and workbench, your load grows, and you carry similar patterns and building blocks into tangential portfolio companies, each cycle faster than the last. Product direction and the roadmap come from the Chief Innovation Officer; your ownership is the build: how the surface works, how the model is served, how it ships, and whether it gets used.

Key Responsibilities

• Build the decision-support engine, with adapters per portfolio company, so one pattern serves multiple lines of business.
• Build the human-in-the-loop decision surfaces: the customer-service workbench, the AE and producer copilot, and lead-generation front ends.
• Design to the human-in-the-loop compliance floor in regulated workflows, preserving human decision points at every regulatory and fiduciary trigger.
• Partner closely with the Data Platform & ML Engineer, building the surfaces and serving layer on top of the models and data they own.
• Work closely with portfolio company leaders and operators, scope solutions in context, and drive adoption in the field.
• Own deployment, CI, and operational hygiene end-to-end. DevOps is part of this role, not a separate seat; our stack is deliberately lean (e.g., Railway, Doppler) so one engineer can run it.
• Establish monitoring and alerting so production issues are caught fast, and balance new build against reliability and technical debt.
• Contribute to architectural decisions that keep surfaces reusable across portfolio companies rather than one-offs.

Qualifications

Required:

• 5 years shipping production software, ideally as a founding engineer or forward-deployed engineer at a startup where you owned frontend, backend, and deployment by necessity.
• Strong full-stack ability across modern frontend and backend, with the judgment to build clean, usable product surfaces. Our current stack leans toward TypeScript/React; fluency there is a plus, not a prerequisite.
• Experience building LLM-backed product features: orchestration, retrieval, and evaluation, not just consuming AI-assisted dev tools.
• Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude, Copilot, Cursor) to accelerate delivery.
• Demonstrated ownership of deployment and operations without a dedicated platform or ops team.
• Experience being embedded with users or customers, scoping in context, and shipping fast against real-world constraints.
• Demonstrated judgment on human-in-the-loop and regulated-workflow design.
• Comfort building under regulatory and fiduciary constraints, and handling sensitive, regulated data (PHI, financial) with the secure practices it requires.
• Strong communication and the ability to prioritize across multiple portfolio companies without close oversight.

Preferred:

• Regulated-domain experience - insurance, reinsurance, healthcare, or financial services - where you have built to compliance constraints.
• Prior forward-deployed or founding-engineer experience at an early-stage company.
• You have built a product and shipped it to production yourself, with a real user on the other end and no platform team behind you.