Forward Deployed Engineer – Retail & AI Solutions

Experience: 6+ years | Location: Onsite at client locations (with travel as required) | Type: Full-time

About the Role

Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) are senior engineers who embed directly with our retail clients to scope, build, and ship production software — not demos, not proofs-of-concept. You will sit with the client’s business and technology teams, translate ambiguous business problems into working systems, and own what you build from first deployment through stabilization.
This is a hands-on engineering role with a consultant’s context: you will spend part of your week in discovery conversations with merchandising, store operations, e-commerce, and supply chain stakeholders, and the rest writing production-grade code that solves what you heard. AI is central to how we deliver — you will build LLM-powered features and agentic workflows, and you will use AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code as a core part of your daily engineering practice.
This is not a pre-sales or demo role. There is no sales quota. Success is measured by working software in the client’s production environment and the business outcomes it drives.

What You Will Do

Discover and scope: Embed with retail client teams to understand the real business problem beneath the stated ask — across areas such as e-commerce, POS, order management, inventory, pricing/promotions, and supply chain — and define solutions where no spec exists.
Build production software: Design and ship full-stack applications and services (Angular front ends, Node.js/TypeScript back ends, REST/GraphQL APIs) inside or integrated with the client’s environment.
Engineer AI solutions: Build LLM-powered features — retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic workflows, tool/function calling, prompt pipelines — and take them from prototype to production with proper evaluation, guardrails, and monitoring.
Work AI-natively: Use Claude Code and similar AI-assisted development tools to compress delivery timelines, and help client engineering teams adopt these practices effectively and safely.
Integrate with enterprise systems: Connect to the client’s existing landscape — commerce platforms, ERP/OMS/WMS, POS, data warehouses, identity/SSO — and navigate security, compliance, and change-management processes.
Own what you ship: Handle deployment, monitoring, incident response, and iteration after go-live; stabilize and improve rather than hand off and leave.
Close the loop: Feed field learnings back into our delivery playbooks, reusable assets, and product/solution roadmap.

Must-Have Qualifications

6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping and operating production systems end-to-end (not only feature work within a large team).
Strong full-stack skills: Angular (or a comparable modern SPA framework with willingness to work in Angular) and Node.js/TypeScript, plus solid fundamentals in API design, SQL/NoSQL data modeling, and testing.
Hands-on AI engineering experience: you have built and shipped at least one real LLM-powered application or workflow (RAG, agents, tool calling, prompt engineering, evals) — beyond tutorials or personal experiments.
Working fluency with AI-assisted development — Claude Code, or equivalent agentic coding tools — and sound judgment about where they accelerate work and where they need human review.
Retail domain exposure: you have delivered software for retail or consumer commerce businesses and can speak the language of at least one area — e-commerce, stores/POS, order management, inventory, pricing, or supply chain.
Client-facing strength: experience working directly with business stakeholders, comfort presenting and defending technical decisions, and the ability to operate with incomplete information.
Cloud deployment experience on AWS, Azure, or GCP, including CI/CD and basic observability.
Willingness to work onsite at client locations, with travel as required by the engagement.

Nice to Have

Experience with the Anthropic API / Claude models, MCP (Model Context Protocol), or agent frameworks such as LangGraph or the Claude Agent SDK.
Python for data and AI workloads; exposure to data platforms (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks) and pipeline tooling.
Direct experience with retail platforms and systems — e.g., commerce platforms (Salesforce Commerce, Shopify, commercetools), SAP or other ERPs, OMS/WMS, or POS systems.
Prior consulting, professional services, or startup experience where you owned outcomes rather than tickets.
Experience mentoring engineers or leading small delivery pods.

Who Thrives in This Role

FDEs are generalists with depth: engineers who are energized by ambiguity, get satisfaction from seeing their software used by real businesses within weeks, and are comfortable being the technical face of the company at a client site. If you prefer a fixed backlog, a single codebase, and minimal stakeholder contact, this role is probably not the right fit — and that’s okay.

Why VirtuosicTechnologies

Work at the intersection of retail and applied AI, on problems where your code visibly moves business metrics.
An AI-native engineering culture: Claude Code and agentic tooling are part of how we build, not an afterthought.
High ownership and fast feedback loops — you scope it, you build it, you run it.
A pathway to senior client-facing technical leadership (Principal FDE / Engagement Architect).