Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Applied AI
Posted Sep 3, 2026
The role in short
Embed with private market clients to design, build, and deploy custom AI agents and full-stack solutions that solve operational workflows.
About Juniper Square
Private markets are one of the largest, most complex, and most underserved corners of global finance. Our mission at Juniper Square is to unlock their full potential. We’re the Operations Partner trusted by 2,300+ GPs, unifying technology, data, and fund administration services into a single platform that helps GPs move faster, make better decisions, and scale with precision. With $300B+ under administration and 700,000+ LPs on platform, we’ve built the scale to match our ambition. And with JunieAI, our purpose-built AI platform, we’re reimagining how private markets operate, embedding intelligence across every workflow. Founder-led since 2014, backed by $350M+ in funding, and now 1,000+ employees strong, we’re building a company designed to shape the future of private markets for decades to come.
Our culture is built for people who want to do ambitious, meaningful work alongside exceptionally talented teammates. We think like owners, move with urgency, and take pride in solving hard problems that truly matter to our customers and the future of private markets. We believe the best ideas come from open debate, deep collaboration, and diverse perspectives, which is why we believe transparency is the default and feedback makes us stronger. If you’re energized by high standards, rapid growth, and the opportunity to help define a category at a pivotal moment, come join us!
Juniper Square offers employees a variety of ways to work, ranging from a fully remote experience to working full-time in one of our physical offices. We invest heavily in digital-first operations, allowing our teams to collaborate effectively across 27 U.S. states, 2 Canadian Provinces, India, Luxembourg, and England. We also have physical offices in San Francisco, New York City, Mumbai and Bangalore for employees who prefer to work in an office some or all of the time.
About Applied AI
Applied AI is Juniper Square’s forward-deployed engineering unit. We design, build, and manage custom AI agents that solve hard operational problems for private markets GPs — running on Juniper Square’s AI infrastructure and integrated with the systems our clients already use. Because we sit on the system of record for the category, we can ship in weeks what otherwise takes years.
About your role
We are hiring Forward Deployed Engineers to work directly with GP clients and own delivery end-to-end — discovery, scoping, design, build, deployment, and the ongoing operation of what you ship. You are in the room with the client, not behind a ticket queue.
This is an AI-first engineering role. The solutions you build are powered by modern AI, and you will work at the leverage AI-assisted development makes possible — while understanding in depth every system you ship.
The work combines product management and full-stack engineering, and calls for someone who can operate independently, when needed, while being supported by a world-class team of engineers. Working from the priorities set with the client and Applied AI leadership, you will run discovery, define requirements, sequence delivery, and make the trade-offs that get working software into users’ hands quickly.
Success is measured by adoption and impact. You own what you build through launch and beyond, iterating on real user feedback and contributing the patterns you develop back to Applied AI’s reusable component library.
What you’ll do
- Work with GP clients — CFOs, COOs, heads of technology, investor relations leads, and the fund accountants, IR associates, and deal teams who will use what you build — to find the workflows where custom agents create real leverage
- Run discovery and translate ambiguous business problems into clear requirements, scope, and acceptance criteria
- Carry each solution through its full lifecycle, from prototype and client validation through hardening, deployment, and rollout to production
- Design and build agentic systems: retrieval and context design, tool and MCP integration, orchestration, evaluation harnesses, and the observability and cost controls that keep them reliable in production
- Operate independently on client-edge solutions, and partner with Juniper Square’s platform and product engineering teams where the work touches core systems
- Make engineering trade-offs that hold up under real client commitments, finding speed through reuse rather than through shortcuts on reliability, security, or maintainability
- Own deployed solutions through adoption, including post-launch support, iteration on user feedback, and ongoing operation
- Produce documentation, train users, and manage rollouts to drive adoption
- Set the technical bar for less experienced engineers on your engagements, and pull them toward running engagements of their own
Qualifications
- 5+ years of professional experience shipping production software end to end, with hands-on experience building AI-enabled applications
- A track record of owning delivery, not just implementation — you have been the person accountable for whether something shipped and got used
- Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous business needs into requirements and deliver working software against them
- Full-stack engineering capability across data, services, user interfaces, and the infrastructure underneath them
- Hands-on infrastructure ownership: deploying and operating applications on a major cloud provider, with working knowledge of containers, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and production monitoring
- Direct experience working with external clients or customers — scoping, delivering, and managing the relationship, not just the code
- Fluency with AI-assisted development, paired with the depth to understand, debug, and defend everything you ship
- Strong product judgment: defining scope for a first release, prioritizing, and knowing when something is done
- Excellent written communication across requirements, documentation, and client-facing updates, and the ability to explain technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders
Nice to have
- Experience in private markets, financial services, or another regulated, data-sensitive domain
- Familiarity with application security and data handling practices for client data under contractual and SOC 2 obligations, including multi-tenant isolation
- Experience building evaluation and regression testing for non-deterministic systems
- Consulting, professional services, or forward deployed engineering background
Compensation
Compensation for this position includes a base salary with equity, and a variety of benefits. The U.S. base salary range for this role is $165,000-$200,000. Actual base salaries will be based on candidate-specific factors, including experience, skillset, and location, and local minimum pay requirements as applicable.
Benefits include:
- Health, dental, and vision care for you and your family
- Life insurance
- Mental wellness coverage
- Fertility and growing family support
- Flex Time Off in addition to company-paid holidays
- Paid family leave, medical leave, and bereavement leave policies
- Retirement savings plans
- Allowance to customize your work and technology setup at home
- Annual professional development stipend
Your recruiter can provide additional details about compensation and benefits.
#LI-NY1
Prep for this interview
5 questions likely to come up at Juniper Square, each matched to a line in this posting.
- 1Discovery and scoping
They wrote: “Run discovery and translate ambiguous business problems into clear requirements, scope, and acceptance criteria”
A customer says “we want AI in our claims process.” What do you ask in the first meeting?
How to answer
Why they ask: Most FDE work starts this vague. They want to hear you find the real problem before you pick a tool.
- Map the current process: who touches a claim, in what order, with which systems
- Find the slowest or most error-prone step and ask what it costs them
- Agree on one measurable goal (for example time per claim, or error rate)
- Ask what data you can access, and who signs off on security
Tip: Ask about the work, not the technology. Who does it today, how long it takes, what a mistake costs, and how they'd know it got better.
- 2Integrations and APIs
They wrote: “Design and build agentic systems: retrieval and context design, tool and MCP integration, orchestration, evaluation harnesses, and the observability and cost controls that keep them reliable in production”
Walk me through connecting our product to a customer's internal system that has no documentation.
How to answer
Why they ask: This happens weekly in the job. They want a calm, step-by-step method.
- Find who owns the system and get read access to a test environment
- Watch real traffic or logs to learn the data shapes
- Build a thin adapter with logging around every call
- Agree on how failures get reported, and who fixes what
Tip: Talk about finding the owner of the system first. The code is the easy part.
- 3Cloud, deployment and security
They wrote: “Make engineering trade-offs that hold up under real client commitments, finding speed through reuse rather than through shortcuts on reliability, security, or maintainability”
The customer's security team sends a 200-question review. How do you handle it?
How to answer
Why they ask: Security reviews often block deals. FDEs help get through them.
- Start from your company's standard answers (SOC 2 report, past reviews)
- Answer clearly; don't oversell
- Bring in your security team for anything you're unsure of
- Keep the new answers for the next customer
Tip: Reuse past answers, flag honest gaps, and offer a call for the hard questions.
- 4Coding
They wrote: “5+ years of professional experience shipping production software end to end, with hands-on experience building AI-enabled applications”
How do you keep quality high when you ship fast at a customer site?
How to answer
Why they ask: Speed is the job, but broken code at a customer is costly. They want your guardrails.
- Tests for the parts that touch customer data or money
- Code review even when it's fast, ideally by someone on the product team
- Feature flags and an easy way to roll back
- Clean up the shortcuts in the next release, and write them down
Tip: Name the few checks you never skip, and what you skip on purpose.
- 5Ownership and working with customers
They wrote: “Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous business needs into requirements and deliver working software against them”
Tell me about a project where the requirements kept changing. What did you do?
How to answer
Why they ask: Ambiguity is the norm. They want proof you can keep moving without a clear spec.
- The project and why requirements kept moving
- What you did to pin them down (short demos, written decisions)
- The trade-offs you made to keep shipping
- The result, with a number if you have one
Tip: Show how you reduced the change, beyond how you coped with it.
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