Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed AI Engineer

📍 Sydney or Melbourne

🚀 OpenAI-backed Hyper-Growth AI Company

Salient has partnered with one of the fastest-growing AI companies globally, and we're looking for Forward Deployed AI Engineers who want to build AI products that actually get used.

In less than two years, the business has grown to 180+ employees, recently joined the OpenAI ecosystem, and is deploying production AI solutions for enterprise customers across multiple industries.

If you're tired of "AI Engineer" roles that amount to wrapping APIs around ChatGPT or building PoCs that never see production, this is something very different.

This role sits at the intersection of software engineering, solution architecture, product, and customer delivery.

You'll work directly with enterprise customers to understand complex business problems, design AI-native solutions, and build production systems that transform how organisations operate.

Think less internal engineering.

Think more technical advisor, architect and builder.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Embed with enterprise customers to understand business problems and identify high-value AI opportunities.
• Design and deploy production-grade AI applications from concept through to rollout.
• Build agentic AI systems, orchestration layers, RAG pipelines, evaluation frameworks and automation workflows.
• Work directly with OpenAI's latest frontier models before they're publicly released.
• Rapidly prototype, iterate and deploy AI solutions in roughly 10-12 weeks.
• Partner with Product, Engineering and customer stakeholders to shape AI strategy and technical direction.
• Own customer outcomes, not just the code.

What They're Looking For:

• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience deploying production AI or LLM applications.
• Experience working directly with customers or internal stakeholders to solve business problems.
• Comfortable operating across engineering, architecture and product discussions.
• Strong communication skills—you enjoy explaining technical concepts to both engineers and executives.
• High ownership, high agency mindset.
• Comfortable working in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.

Tech You'll Work With:

• Python
• Model Agnostic (OpenAI, Claude, Cursor)
• LangGraph / LangChain
• Agentic AI Frameworks
• RAG
• Vector Databases
• AI Evaluation Frameworks
• Modern Observability Tooling

Why This Role?

Unlike most AI companies, they're already deploying production systems at scale.

You'll receive early access to OpenAI models and capabilities, helping shape how frontier AI is used before the rest of the market.

The culture is equally compelling:

• Flat engineering structure
• High autonomy
• No bureaucracy
• No "noisy politics"
• Equity from day one
• Build products that reach production in weeks, not months

Note: Must be Permanent Resident or Australian Citizen