Forward Deployed Engineer

🏢 Appen · 📍 San Francisco, California · 💼 hybrid · ⏰ Permanent - Regular Full-time 💰 $150,000 - $200,000 / yr

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Position Summary & Responsibilities

Role Purpose

The Forward Deployed Engineer works directly with enterprise clients to design, deploy, and optimize GenAI data solutions, with full ownership of final delivered data quality. Embedded across engineering, data operations, and client delivery, this role ensures datasets, pipelines, workflows, and automations meet defined accuracy, reliability, and performance requirements for GenAI model development.

Your Impact

Act as a trusted consultative partner to clients by defining requirements, clarifying success criteria, shaping high-quality annotation guidelines, and proactively providing insights.
Influence the what and the why behind GenAI data solutions by translating ambiguous client needs into clear, scalable workflows.
Deliver GenAI datasets that meet all defined acceptance and quality criteria.
Define the validation and automation requirements that reduce variance, manual review effort, rework, and time to validation.
Partner with engineering to build requirements as scalable, reproducible, and observable pipelines.
Contribute reusable quality frameworks and validators adopted across multiple projects.

What You Bring

3+ years of experience in a customer-facing technical role such as solutions engineering, solutions architect, data or technical consulting, or data operations.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Experience working on GenAI, machine learning, or model evaluation data, including LLM training, annotation, or evaluation workflows.
A consultative problem-solving approach when leading client conversations, asking sharp questions, and guiding stakeholders toward better decisions.
Ability to vibe code but proficiency in Python and SQL is a plus
Confidence in working directly with client engineering or machine learning teams.

Location and Work Arrangement

This is a hybrid role based in San Francisco, CA. You will be required to work from our San Francisco office two days per week.

🎯 Candidate Preparation Guide For Appen Applicants

Key Role Competencies & Evaluation Highlights

Key Role Focus:

Focuses on global scalability, meticulous management of distributed human-in-the-loop workforces, and AI data quality control.

📋 Preparation Priorities (Key Areas to Clarify):

1. Ignoring the ethical and operational complexities of managing global contractor workforces
2. Treating data labeling as a purely automated problem without human nuance
3. Inability to handle massive volume scale and asynchronous communication challenges

✨ Recommended Role Alignment Hook:

I build robust operational frameworks that ensure AI training data is ethical, scalable, and exceptionally high-fidelity.

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