What are the responsibilities and job description for the Forward Deployed Engineer position at Luma?
Forward Deployed Engineers turn what Luma's models can do into systems customers actually rely on. You embed with a customer, learn their workflow, define the problem with them, and build the production system that solves it, with their data and their constraints. You own both the relationship and the code.
This is engineering at the edge, where ambiguity is the default and "what should we build?" is yours to answer. It's built for people who've already been the single point of ownership on a hard problem: a technical founder, the engineer who flew out and rebuilt a customer's workflow, a consultant who actually wrote the system. If you need a PRD and a well-defined ticket queue, this isn't it.
What You'll Own
One way the first 90 could unfold.
About Luma: Luma's mission is to build unified general intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world. We believe multimodality is critical for intelligence — the next step beyond language models comes from vision. Luma is an equal opportunity employer.
Compensation Range: $168K - $252K
This is engineering at the edge, where ambiguity is the default and "what should we build?" is yours to answer. It's built for people who've already been the single point of ownership on a hard problem: a technical founder, the engineer who flew out and rebuilt a customer's workflow, a consultant who actually wrote the system. If you need a PRD and a well-defined ticket queue, this isn't it.
What You'll Own
- Work directly with customers to understand their workflows, constraints, and goals, and define the problem yourself.
- Build production systems on Luma's APIs, models, and internal tools.
- Prototype, ship, iterate, and maintain systems customers depend on in real environments with real data.
- Own projects end to end, from first conversation to deployed system.
- Build around platform gaps when something's missing, and feed recurring patterns back to platform and R&D to productize.
- Use AI to accelerate implementation, while the core of the work stays engineering judgment: what to build and how to make it reliable.
One way the first 90 could unfold.
- Days 1–30 — Immerse & Diagnose: Embed with a first customer, learn their workflow, and define the real problem.
- Days 30–60 — Ship & Validate: Build and deploy a production system they actually use.
- Days 60–90 — Scale & Systemize: Spot the pattern worth productizing and work with R&D to turn it into platform.
- 2 years of professional software engineering, with software shipped end to end.
- Strong proficiency in at least one general-purpose language (Python, TypeScript, Go, or similar).
- Ability to work across the stack and learn unfamiliar systems quickly.
- Bachelor's in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
- Willingness to travel to client sites as needed.
- A track record of shipping real systems with real users, not just assigned tasks.
- High agency and strong prioritization: you find the core problem and move.
- Comfort defining your own path when there isn't one.
- Evidence of working directly with customers and translating what you heard into what you built.
- Clear communication, including explaining a technical decision to a non-technical stakeholder.
About Luma: Luma's mission is to build unified general intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world. We believe multimodality is critical for intelligence — the next step beyond language models comes from vision. Luma is an equal opportunity employer.
Compensation Range: $168K - $252K
Salary : $168,000 - $252,000