Forward Deployed Agile Software Engineer (New York)

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About This Role

TribalScale is a digital innovation firm assisting organizations in modernizing technology platforms and adapting to shifting business landscapes through emerging technologies and artificial intelligence. The firm is currently looking for a Forward Deployed Agile Software Engineer to operate at the intersection of client delivery, product development, artificial intelligence, and software engineering. In this capacity, you will embed with internal and client teams to analyze complex business hurdles, swiftly design solutions,…

Job Description

Responsibilities

• Partner directly with clients to grasp objectives, operational constraints, workflows, data, and technical environments
• Convert ambiguous business challenges into solution architectures, prototypes, delivery plans, and technical requirements
• Design and construct AI-enabled applications, developer tools, agentic workflows, APIs, data pipelines, and full-stack products
• Engineer infrastructure around AI models including prompts, context, memory, tools, permissions, feedback mechanisms, and runtime controls
• Build and refine agent loops supporting planning, tool selection, execution, observation, reflection, recovery, and termination
• Model intricate workflows using state machines, graphs, or orchestration patterns that coordinate humans, models, tools, and systems
• Create evaluation frameworks measuring accuracy, task completion, reliability, safety, latency, cost, and user value
• Develop rapid proofs of concept, validate them with users and evaluations, and evolve them into scalable, secure products
• Integrate solutions with cloud platforms, enterprise data sources, client systems, and third-party services
• Contribute across the entire technology stack from user interfaces and backend services to AI infrastructure and deployment pipelines
• Implement approval steps, permission boundaries, safeguards, and fallbacks for autonomous and semi-autonomous systems
• Instrument AI applications to inspect traces, diagnose failures, understand intermediate states, and improve system performance
• Troubleshoot operational and technical issues within client environments
• Communicate technical trade-offs, risks, progress, and decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Collaborate across multidisciplinary delivery teams including product managers, designers, engineers, data specialists, and security teams
• Establish engineering practices like automated testing, continuous delivery, security, documentation, and observability
• Capture reusable patterns and components to enhance TribalScale engineering capabilities and future client work
• Support technical discovery, workshops, solution demonstrations, and pre-sales conversations when required

Requirements

• Professional background in building and deploying production-grade software, including AI-powered or agentic systems
• Strong proficiency in Python, TypeScript, or another programming language used for AI applications, platforms, and developer tooling
• Practical understanding of harness engineering for designing infrastructure, context, tools, permissions, and controls for AI agents
• Experience developing or working with agent loops, graph-based orchestration, state machines, and multi-step workflows
• Experience designing evaluation systems for AI applications including benchmarks, regression suites, and production monitoring
• Understanding of trade-offs involving prompts, context management, memory, retrieval, tool use, and model selection
• Experience instrumenting AI systems to trace decisions, measure quality, and diagnose failures
• Knowledge of APIs, distributed systems, databases, cloud infrastructure, and modern software development practices
• Ability to quickly grasp unfamiliar systems, technologies, and business domains
• Product judgment to balance model capability, reliability, latency, cost, security, and user experience
• Experience collaborating directly with customers, stakeholders, or cross-functional delivery teams
• Written and verbal communication skills to clearly explain AI-system behavior, risks, and technical trade-offs
• Comfort working in fast-paced environments with evolving requirements and technical constraints
• High degree of ownership, curiosity, empathy, and bias toward action
• Ability to travel occasionally for client workshops or on-site delivery when required

Qualifications

• Experience with agent frameworks, workflow engines, coding agents, or custom model-orchestration systems
• Experience creating tool interfaces, execution sandboxes, permission models, and human-in-the-loop controls
• Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector search, knowledge graphs, fine-tuning, and model-routing strategies
• Experience evaluating AI systems using golden datasets, simulators, adversarial testing, and online experiments
• Familiarity with AI observability including traces, cost analysis, latency measurement, and quality dashboards
• Experience building systems using multiple models or specialized agents
• Understanding of AI security concerns such as prompt injection, data leakage, excessive agency, and supply-chain risks
• Experience with cloud platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud
• Experience with containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD tooling
• Contributions to open-source AI infrastructure, evaluation tooling, or agent frameworks
• Experience working in regulated or complex enterprise environments
• Experience in consulting, professional services, solutions engineering, sales engineering, or customer-facing technical roles
• History of taking products from initial discovery through production launch and adoption
• Claude Certified Architect Foundations or Professional certification or equivalent practical experience with Claude-based solutions
• Experience with agentic AI and harness-driven development

Core Skills

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