Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role:

We are seeking Principal Forward Deployed Engineers who thrive on shipping production software, solving complex systems problems, and pioneering AI-first engineering workflows.

As a Principal FDE, you lead the enterprise architecture and technical strategy for major client engagements, serving as a trusted advisor to executive leaders. Remaining hands-on in the code, you align delivery with strategic goals, model AI-first practices, and elevate client teams through active mentorship.

What You'll Do:

• Defining and driving the overarching enterprise architecture and technical strategy across complex client engagements

• Writing and reviewing production code across critical systems: establishing high-watermark standards for architecture, resilience, and security alongside embedded delivery teams

• Integrating AI and LLM capabilities into enterprise architectures: designing scale-ready agentic systems, RAG platforms, enterprise AI governance, and developer productivity ecosystems

• Pioneering AI-assisted software delivery: using advanced AI coding environments, LLM tooling, and agentic assistants to accelerate refactoring, code generation, and test writing in client codebases

• Enabling client engineering teams on AI-first practices: hands-on coaching and pairing with client developers to integrate AI coding assistants into their daily development workflows and culture

• Evaluating and implementing AI safety, observability, and evaluation frameworks: ensuring client AI integrations are secure, reliable, and production-ready rather than just experimental prototypes

• Leading large-scale legacy modernizations: architecting the migration off monolithic platforms to resilient, cloud-native microservices and event-driven architectures

• Serving as the primary technical executive interface: advising client engineering leaders and directors on risk mitigation, platform evolution, and technical roadmap execution

• Establishing delivery governance, automated testing standards, security guardrails, and CI/CD best practices across multi-team engagements

• Mentoring and elevating staff and lead engineers across client and internal Liatrio organizations through architecture reviews, strategic pairing, and hands-on guidance

• Partnering with executive account leaders on strategic account growth, technical proposal creation, statement of work (SOW) development, and key client pitches

Experience and Skills:

Engineering and Enterprise Architecture

• You have a track record of owning the architectural direction of complex workstreams in enterprise environments, you've made the hard technical calls, been accountable for the outcomes, and learned from the experiences that didn't go as planned

• You've modernized large legacy applications in real enterprise environments, you understand the strangler fig pattern, incremental refactoring, and event-driven decomposition as practical strategies you've applied under real constraints

• You're fluent across the full delivery stack, frontend, backend, APIs, data, cloud infrastructure, with genuine depth in multiple areas

• You've designed and delivered cloud-native, distributed systems at enterprise scale, microservices, event-driven architectures, API gateways, async messaging, and you understand the failure modes and operational complexity that comes with them

• You've operated in large enterprise environments with multi-cloud setups, complex organizational structures, and legacy constraints, and you know how to deliver meaningful progress despite them

• You can hold the technical bar for an entire workstream, reviewing architecture, reviewing code, catching problems early, and developing engineers through the process

• You have enough knowledge of platform engineering, infrastructure as code, cloud-native platform adoption, whether that's Kubernetes, managed container services, or other orchestration platforms depending on client environment, and DevOps practices to make good architectural decisions and speak credibly to the engineers responsible for the platform

AI and Intelligent Systems

• You possess end-to-end operational experience designing and deploying enterprise AI solutions, from model integration and RAG pipelines to security, observability, and evaluation framework adoption

• You define and model AI-augmented engineering workflows, leveraging modern AI tooling as an institutional force multiplier for developer velocity

• You communicate credibly with VP- and C-level client leaders about pragmatic AI strategies, transformation metrics, and high-ROI technical initiatives

Requirements

• 10+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with significant time spent leading enterprise architecture or principal-level engineering initiatives

• Must be authorized to work in the United States or Canada without sponsorship

• Travel availability: 25% depending on client needs