Forward Deployed Engineer - AI, Dedicated Staffing

Company Overview

NWN is the leading AI-powered technology solutions provider for North America's most innovative public and private organizations. For more than 30 years, NWN has helped over 5,000 CIOs deliver technology modernization programs with its Intelligent Workplace, Customer Experience (CX), Managed Devices, Cybersecurity and Public Safety, Connectivity, and Intelligent Cloud solutions. The company's proprietary Experience Management Platform ensures seamless service delivery, real-time observability and improved efficiency for its clients' most demanding technology needs. NWN is a high-performance, high-integrity team of 1,000+ experts committed to a customer-obsessed culture, earning a 75 Customer Net Promoter Score. The company has been recognized with hundreds of industry awards and is proud to be a 'Best Place to Work' with an 86 Employee Net Promoter Score. For more information, visit: NWN.ai.

Responsibilities

The Forward Deployed Engineer role is responsible for embedding with a strategic healthcare client's engineering and business teams to design, build, and operationalize AI-enabled solutions on the client's cloud platform, and for building the client's internal capability to own and operate those solutions independently.

The client is a regional, not-for-profit health plan headquartered in Rhode Island that is significantly expanding its in-house engineering organization and adopting AI across claims, prior authorization, appeals and grievances, member services, and quality programs. The Forward Deployed Engineer works on site with the client's CTO office, application engineering, infrastructure and cloud, and business product teams as NWN's dedicated engineering resource, and is supported by NWN's Intelligent Cloud, AI & Innovation, and Cybersecurity practices.

Essential, key job responsibilities for this role include, but are not limited to:

• Embed with client engineering, product management, and business stakeholders as a dedicated, on-site engineering resource; participate in the client's stand-ups, planning, and delivery cadence.

• Translate business requirements from claims, prior authorization, appeals and grievances, member services, and quality/Medicare Stars stakeholders into scoped, sequenced engineering work with defined success metrics.

• Design, build, and deploy AI-enabled solutions and agents on Microsoft Azure and Azure AI Foundry, including retrieval pipelines, tool-using agents, evaluation harnesses, and integrations with Snowflake, ServiceNow, and enterprise APIs.

• Re-platform prototypes the client has already proven onto governed, observable, production-grade patterns without unnecessary rewrites.

• Establish and maintain developer experience standards for AI coding tools (Claude Code or equivalent) and Azure AI Foundry, including repository conventions, model routing, prompt and context management, and pre-commit guardrails.

• Instrument all solutions with OpenTelemetry traces and cost/token metrics into the client's Grafana-based observability stack from initial deployment.

• Work within, and contribute to, the client's AI governance framework, including risk-tiered agent autonomy, PHI controls (Microsoft Purview, DLP, Entra ID), rollback and change controls, and AI-specific testing and evaluation.

• Author and maintain policy-as-code artifacts so that compliance controls are enforced in the CI/CD pipeline and audit evidence is generated automatically.

• Apply FinOps discipline to AI workloads: forecast and monitor token consumption, select right-sized models for each task, and report cost per use case.

• Run short discovery-to-working-software cycles (two to three weeks) with executive readouts covering cost, outcome, and recommended next steps.

• Map every initiative to the client's business outcomes: medical loss ratio, customer satisfaction, operating expense, and Medicare Star ratings.

• Pair with, mentor, and train client engineers; document patterns as reusable, machine-readable playbooks; support the client's hiring and onboarding of platform and AI engineers.

• Provide NWN account and practice leadership with regular visibility into client needs, emerging use cases, and opportunities for additional NWN services.

• Consistent, accurate and timely tracking of client work and related documentation including daily timesheets.

• Other responsibilities as assigned.

Qualifications

The following are minimum qualifications and requirements required for this role:

• 6+ years of experience that is directly related to the duties and responsibilities specified, including 2+ years building LLM-based or agentic systems that have reached production.

• Strong proficiency in Python and TypeScript, with experience across APIs, data pipelines, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and observability instrumentation.

• Hands-on Microsoft Azure experience, including Entra ID, networking and private endpoints, Azure DevOps, and at least one of Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, or Microsoft Fabric.

• Experience with Snowflake or a comparable enterprise data warehouse.

• Daily use of AI coding assistants (Claude Code or equivalent) as an integral part of the software development workflow.

• Experience working with protected data in a regulated environment (HIPAA/PHI, PCI, or equivalent) and with the associated audit and evidence requirements.

• Ability to collect and develop business and technical requirements directly from non-technical stakeholders.

• Comfortable, poised, and affable with customers from end users to senior level executives.

• Highly flexible, self-directed and with ability to adapt in a rapidly changing environment.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

• Ability to work on site at client premises in the Providence, RI area approximately three days per week.

• Must be based in, and perform all work from, the United States.

• Demonstrated comfort with adopting emerging AI tools and technologies to optimize processes, improve collaboration, and drive operational effectiveness.

The following qualifications are ideal, but not required:

• Bachelor's degree preferred.

• Healthcare payer experience: claims and EDI transactions (837/835/834/270/271), eligibility and enrollment, prior authorization, appeals and grievances, quality and risk adjustment programs, CMS Stars/CAHPS, or CMS interoperability requirements (FHIR APIs).

• Experience with policy-as-code (OPA/Rego or similar) and AI governance frameworks such as NIST AI RMF, including model evaluation and red-teaming.

• Observability depth with OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, and ServiceNow ITOM integration; SRE background.

• Prior consulting, forward deployed, or customer engineering experience with direct accountability for client outcomes.

• Experience building internal capability within a client organization, including training and mentoring client engineers.

• At least one relevant certification (Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Azure AI Engineer Associate, Azure DevOps Engineer Expert, or equivalent).

Travel: Local driving distance to client premises in the Providence, RI area on a regular basis; occasional travel to NWN offices.

At NWN, we provide a comprehensive benefits package to support your well-being in and out of work. This includes medical, dental, and vision plans, Health Savings Account (HSA) and Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs), income protection through disability and life insurance, and a 401(k) with company match. Enjoy unlimited PTO, paid company holidays, hybrid/remote work, paid bonding leave for eligible employees, employee discounts, and access to our Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Additional offerings include accident, critical illness, long-term care, and hospital indemnity coverages, legal and identity theft protection, pet insurance, supplemental life insurances, referral bonuses, charitable donation matching, and allowances for eligible roles. Join a team that values the health and wellbeing of all our employees!

All offers of employment at NWN are contingent upon the successful completion of a comprehensive background check. This process ensures a safe and secure work environment for all employees.

NWN is an Equal Opportunity Employer: NWN provides equal employment opportunity to all employees and applicants for employment free from unlawful discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, marital status, sexual orientation or any other status or condition protected by local, state or federal law.