Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Brisbane, Australia · Hybrid / embedded · Full-time

Reports to: CTO / Head of Technology

About Valont

Valont is an AI-native business services platform built for small and medium businesses.

We combine real-time business intelligence, AI-driven advisory, deep integrations and AI-delivered service workflows to give business owners a single intelligent view of their business, and a trusted AI operating layer that helps deliver the work, not just analyse it.

Valont is part of Wattlestone, a Brisbane-based private investment firm. We acquire high-quality service firms, integrate them onto our proprietary AI platform, and scale advisory, automation and insight at speed.

Why this role exists

• We’re acquiring real service firms and rebuilding how they deliver.
• The opportunity is not just to make existing teams more efficient. It is to redesign service delivery around outcomes: bookkeeping completed, accounts reconciled, insights delivered, obligations managed, candidates screened, documents generated, approvals routed, actions followed through, with AI systems doing more of the work directly.
• We are not building SaaS around service businesses. We are rebuilding the service business itself, using software and AI to deliver outcomes with fewer manual steps, fewer handoffs and better margins.

That cannot be designed from behind a laptop at HQ. It happens when someone sits inside the business, watches how the work actually gets done, understands the messy operational reality, and builds the automation that changes how the business runs.

You will be close to the customer, close to the workflow and close to the code. You will have real autonomy, senior leadership in your corner, and a direct hand in shaping how AI transforms service businesses in the real world.

What you’ll actually do

You’ll be embedded inside the businesses we acquire and own outcomes end-to-end.

A regular engineer builds one feature for many customers. You’ll build many capabilities for one business at a time, and watch them go live in the real world within weeks:

• Sit with customers and partner businesses to understand the real workflow, the real pain and the real commercial problem.
• Work from real operational artefacts: process maps, inboxes, SharePoint folders, customer records, training videos, spreadsheets and edge cases, and turn them into AI-delivered workflows.
• Extract the domain logic behind existing processes: why a step exists, what risk it manages, what outcome it protects, and where the work can be removed entirely.
• Build across every surface: customer-facing experiences, advisor tooling, internal automations, integrations, approvals and back-office workflows.
• Ship full-stack service automations using TypeScript, Next.js, React, APIs, Postgres/Drizzle and our agent stack, integrating with the tools SMBs already rely on.
• Use AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor and Codex as your everyday multiplier.
• Improve the operating businesses themselves: email routing, advisor workflows, customer handoffs, approval flows, exception handling and internal service reliability.
• Stay close to production: when a workflow fails, a job ad does not post, an approval gets stuck, or an integration breaks, you help diagnose, fix and improve the system.
• Bring the field back into the product: what customers ask for, where teams get stuck, what breaks repeatedly, and what should be automated next.

The work that makes it matter

We’re building an autopilot, not a copilot.

• A copilot helps someone move through the same process faster. An autopilot delivers the outcome with less human effort, fewer handoffs and fewer manual steps.
• Most businesses can describe the workflow they already know. They can tell you where it hurts, where it slows down and where people get stuck. Your job is to go deeper than that, to understand what the business is actually trying to achieve, then build the system that makes whole parts of the old process unnecessary.
• This is not SaaS sitting beside a service business. It is software becoming part of how the service is delivered.
• The value is not in giving a business another dashboard. The value is in completing the work: reconciling the accounts, routing the exception, preparing the approval, generating the document, surfacing the risk, sending the next action and closing the loop.
• You will need the discipline to avoid simply digitising today’s process. The goal is to remove work, not decorate it.
• You will have senior leadership backing the calls and clearing the path. But the instinct to move beyond “this is faster now” toward “this step no longer needs to exist” has to come from you.
• Get this right and you are not just shipping features. You are helping redesign how an entire industry delivers its services.

You’ll thrive here if you…

• Have 4+ years shipping production software full-stack, with TypeScript preferred and Python a bonus.
• Are confident with React/Next.js, APIs and Postgres.
• Already use AI coding agents and understand how to use them to ship faster without lowering the bar.
• Can sit across from a tradie, bookkeeper or business owner, earn trust quickly, and understand what they mean even when they cannot articulate it clearly.
• Have strong product judgement, commercial sense and comfort operating in ambiguity.
• Can separate the process from the outcome: you do not just build what someone asks for; you work out what actually needs to change.
• Move quickly, make pragmatic calls and care about whether the thing actually works in production.
• Want startup-level ownership, direct exposure to real businesses, and the pace of a team that ships daily.

Bonus points for hands-on experience with AI agents, multi-agent systems, Vercel AI SDK, Inngest, workflow automation, or building something from zero.

We hold a high technical bar, but the differentiator in this role is the combination of engineering skill, business instinct and people judgement.

What’s in it for you

• Leverage like nowhere else: you help turn an acquired service business into an AI-delivered operating model.
• Genuinely AI-first: a team that builds with frontier AI end-to-end, not one that just talks about it.
• Outcome ownership: your work will directly change how real services are delivered, measured and scaled.
• Real exposure: you will work across customers, workflows, systems, operations and product decisions.
• Room to grow fast: senior technical backing, autonomy, competitive salary and long-term incentive potential.

Location

Brisbane-based. This is a hybrid role.

You will spend meaningful time on the floor with the businesses we acquire, because the best work happens in the room, with flexibility to work remotely around it.

Sound like you?

If reinventing how an entire industry delivers its services is the kind of problem that gets you out of bed, and you want to build AI systems that deliver real business outcomes, not just better interfaces — we want to meet you.

Send a short cover note and your CV to [email protected].

Valont is committed to building a team that reflects the world we build for. All qualified applicants are considered regardless of background.