Principal Forward Deployed Engineer – Applied AI Focus

Department: Forward Deployed Engineering

Location: United States

Compensation: $180K – $250K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

The role

This is the deep-end engineering role on the FDE bench. You're not just configuring on the platform — you're building off it, into it, and around it. On a typical engagement, you're working side-by-side with the client's own engineering team: integrating into their loan origination system, their data warehouse, their identity stack, their CI. You're the technical authority in the room.

You're still forward deployed, still co-owning the strategic outcome, still client-facing. But your edge is depth — system design, distributed architecture, secure integration, and the ability to ship production code under banking-grade scrutiny.

What you'll do

• Lead the technical design and delivery of complex banking AI engagements, including off-platform builds and bespoke integrations into client systems

• Partner directly with client engineering, security, and architecture teams — speak their language, respect their constraints, design for their reality

• Architect end-to-end agentic systems: data ingress, model orchestration, evals, observability, security, and the production wrapper around all of it

• Make the call on what to build on Titan's platform vs. what to build bespoke vs. what to push back into our roadmap

• Mentor mid-level FDEs and influence platform direction by codifying what you learn into reusable assets and patterns

• Represent Titan's engineering credibility to banking CTOs, CISOs, and their architects

Who you are

• A senior engineer with real production scars. You've shipped systems that mattered to real users, at meaningful scale or under meaningful constraint.

• A builder above all. Title less interesting than slope. Many of the best people we know took unconventional paths to get here — that's a feature, not an exception.

• A strong client-facing presence. You can hold your own with a bank CTO, push back on a CISO's threat model with substance, and translate between engineers and executives in real time.

• A systems thinker. You see how a piece fits — and where it doesn't — before you start typing.

• Hypothesis-driven, opinion-strong, ego-light. You commit to a direction, you ship to test it, and you change course when the data says to.

• Banking or regulated-industry experience strongly preferred — financial services, insurance, healthcare, defense, energy, or similar.

Technical foundation

• Senior-level full-stack with a strong backend spike — distributed systems, API design, secure integration patterns, infrastructure fluency

• Deep experience building production-grade agents using LangChain, LangGraph, DeepAgents, and model-provider SDKs (Claude SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK)

• Fluency in agent search patterns — agent file search, vector RAG, vectorless RAG — and the tradeoffs between them

• Strong working knowledge of AI security frameworks: observability, data controls, model gateways, prompt and tool-call sandboxing

• Hands-on experience designing and running evals; familiarity with training and fine-tuning loops

• Process orchestration and automation at scale

• Comfort owning architectural decisions across the full stack of a production AI system

Why Titan

We're building the AI platform for banking because most of the two million people employed by 4,000+ U.S. banks cannot safely and securely use modern AI tools at work — and none of them are using AI purpose-built for their domain. We're changing that. Our platform includes:

• Titan Foundry — secure gateway to top AI models for bank employees

• Banking-Reasoning Models — our flagship small language models for financial services, trained by ex-regulators and banking leaders

• Banking Agents — a configurable AI application layer with expertise in lending, compliance, underwriting, and operations

Our team comes from Goldman Sachs, KeyBank, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. We've built and sold companies into the top 25 U.S. banks. We're pre-Series A, small, and shipping.

A senior FDE here is the person we point to when a client's CTO asks "who's actually building this?" — and the answer needs to be unambiguous.

What we offer

• Competitive base salary plus meaningful pre-Series A equity (senior-level grant)

• Remote-first with regular client travel (~30–50%, depending on engagement)

• Unlimited PTO

• 100% of employee medical, dental, and vision premiums covered by Titan