Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: New York, New York, United States, Los Angeles, California, United States, Seattle, Washington, United States, San Francisco, California, United States

Department: Product Engineering

Workplace: hybrid

Employment Type: full

Description

At Palona, the Forward Deployed Engineer is a new kind of builder—born from the era of adaptive, multimodal AI systems. This role sits at the intersection of engineering, customer partnership, and real-world operations. You’ll work directly with operators in one of the most dynamic industries in the world and help guide AI agents that learn and evolve alongside them.

If you’re the type of person who loves both systems and people, who’s energized by real-world complexity, and who wants your work to have immediate impact in live environments, this is your path.

Responsibilities

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you’ll be the connective tissue between our product, our customers, and the AI agents we deploy into the field. You will:

• Partner deeply with operators and customers to understand how the business actually runs, uncover real-world workflows, and translate them into system behavior.
• Scope, design, and deploy adaptive AI agents that evolve with the customer’s environment—not static models, but living systems that improve through interaction.
• Build and integrate production-ready applications that connect Palona’s AI platform to customer infrastructure.
• Develop demos, prototypes, and workflows that show how adaptive agents solve real operational problems.
• Debug edge cases in the wild and convert observations from real deployments into product intelligence and system improvements.
• Ensure reliability, safety, and performance of AI agents operating in fast-moving, operationally intense environments.
• Build long-term relationships where you and the agent grow alongside the customer.

This is neither a pure engineering role nor a pure consulting role—it is a hybrid built for range, curiosity, and ownership.

Requirements

Required

• Strong full-stack development skills (Python, JavaScript, or similar)
• Experience in customer-facing or client delivery roles
• Ability to thrive in fast-moving, resource-constrained, startup-style environments
• Fast learner capable of adapting to new tools, domains, and requirements
• High ownership mindset with the ability to work independently and follow problems end-to-end
• Excellent communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders

Preferred

• Deploying LLMs, multimodal models, or generative AI systems
• Background in NLP, computer vision, or multi-agent systems
• Sales engineering, pre-sales, or customer success engineering in high-growth environments
• Experience working in domains with heavy operational complexity (hospitality, logistics, retail, etc.)
• Curiosity and empathy to explore both the technology and hospitality
• Technical fluency to diagnose, build, and refine systems
• Clear communication across both technical and non-technical teams
• Adaptability in environments where requirements shift weekly
• Ownership to take problems from discovery to deployment