Forward Deployed Engineer

The Forward-Deployed AI Engineer will transform MISO’s most important business challenges into practical, production-ready AI solutions. Working side‑by‑side with domain experts, this role blends data, AI, and software engineering to rapidly design, build, and deploy intelligent applications and agents. You will own the full lifecycle from problem discovery through production adoption, ensuring each solution delivers clear and measurable business value. By developing secure, reliable, and reusable AI components within MISO’s enterprise standards, this role accelerates innovation and reduces reliance on external vendors. Success in the first year is demonstrated by faster delivery of priority AI use cases, measurable improvements in decision quality and operational efficiency, and solutions that meet defined performance and governance criteria in production. Ultimately, the engineer empowers internal teams to independently operate and extend these solutions while contributing reusable patterns and assets that strengthen MISO’s broader AI ecosystem.

Some of the impactful contributions you’ll make as MISO’s Forward-Deployed AI Engineer include:

• Partnering directly with the business to understand real workflows, uncover operational challenges, and translate domain expertise into clear technical requirements and actionable solution designs.
• Leading AI and agentic solution delivery end‑to‑end - from discovery and architecture through data integration, testing, deployment, observability, and continuous improvement.
• Rapidly producing working increments using governed production or representative data, demonstrating visible progress to domain experts on a frequent, iterative cadence.
• Designing and implementing AI applications, copilots, agents, retrieval pipelines, APIs, and automation that integrate seamlessly with MISO’s enterprise technology environment and standards.
• Establishing robust evaluation methods and safety measures that validate accuracy, reliability, hallucination risk, workflow completion, and business usefulness against defined thresholds.
• Building solutions using composable architectures, reusable services, and model‑agnostic patterns that reduce lock‑in and enable scaling across the enterprise.
• Ensuring long‑term sustainability by creating runbooks, documentation, and reusable assets, and by pairing with internal engineers to transfer knowledge and ensure independent operation.
• Delivering measurable business outcomes (including faster delivery from discovery to production, improved decision) making and efficiency, and AI solutions that teams can operate and extend without ongoing reliance on the Forward‑Deployed AI Engineer.

You’ll need the following skills to be successful as our Forward-Deployed AI Engineer:

• Strong foundational education in computer science, engineering, data science, or a related technical field, with an advanced degree preferred.
• Extensive experience (15 years) across software, data, AI/ML engineering, solution architecture, or product engineering, including hands‑on delivery of production AI/ML solutions.
• Deep proficiency in modern programming languages—especially Python—and strong SQL skills, with the ability to design secure, scalable back‑end services and APIs.
• Expertise integrating applications with enterprise data sources, APIs, cloud services, and distributed systems, ideally within a Microsoft Azure environment.
• Demonstrated experience with cloud‑native engineering practices, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, production support, and containerization technologies.
• Strong applied knowledge of generative AI, agent orchestration, retrieval‑augmented generation, prompt/context engineering, and AI evaluation frameworks.
• Ability to translate complex business workflows into robust technical solutions by working directly with domain experts and converting operational needs into actionable requirements.
• Familiarity with AI observability, governance, human‑in‑the‑loop workflows, and model reliability practices to ensure safe and effective production AI operations.

Appropriate level will be determined based upon experience and knowledge.

Transformative innovation is happening in the electric industry, from digitalizing homes and distributed resources to renewable energy and an ever-changing grid. MISO manages the electricity superhighway in the Central U.S. and through use of groundbreaking research and advanced technology, our highly skilled employees ensure power flows reliably to 45 million Americans. Operating the electricity grid, running a robust energy market, planning for a bright future – it’s what our immensely hardworking and dedicated team does every day.

The base salary compensation range being offered for this role is $190,000 - $215,000 USD annually.  Base salary range for this position is included in accordance with requirements of various state/local pay transparency legislation. Please note that salaries may vary for different individuals in the same role based on several factors, including but not limited to location of the role, individual competencies, education/professional certifications, and qualifications/experience. 

Position is also eligible for an annual bonus if individual performance and company objectives are met.  At MISO we offer a comprehensive benefits package, including 401k, vacation, sick and safe time, available on your first day of employment.

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Salary : $190,000 - $215,000