Forward Deployed Engineer
Posted yesterday
The role in short
Build and deploy production AI agents and applications for enterprise customers in healthcare, government, and finance by integrating Trase OS into their existing workflows.
About Us
Co-founded in 2023 by Joe Laws and Grant Verstandig, Trase Systems is AI, Uncomplicated. Trase empowers enterprise leaders to harness the full potential of AI without the associated complexity and risks. We are an end-to-end solution for deploying, managing, and optimizing AI in the enterprise. Our platform specializes in bridging the “last mile” of AI adoption, unlocking AI's full potential while driving efficiency and significant cost savings. Trase is at the forefront of AI Agent innovation, topping the Hugging Face GAIA Leaderboard for Generalized AI Assistants, ahead of industry giants such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. We are leveraging our cutting-edge technologies to develop mission-critical agentic applications in complex industries such as Healthcare, Oil & Gas, and National Security.
About the Role
As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Trase, you’ll build and deploy AI agents and applications that solve real customer problems using Trase OS. You’ll join Leagues, our industry verticals team, supporting customers in healthcare, state and local government and education (SLED), financial services, or retail. Your focus may be one or more of these verticals; experience in all four is not required.
This is a hands-on software engineering role with direct customer ownership. You’ll work with users to understand their workflows, turn unclear requirements into technical plans, and take solutions from prototype through production. You’ll partner closely with Product, ML, and the Origin and Arena engineering teams to build on Trase OS and feed customer needs back into the platform.
We are hiring at Mid, Senior and Staff levels. Level will reflect your demonstrated engineering depth, independence, and scope of ownership.
Why This Role is Needed
Customer value depends on how well AI works within existing systems, data, and day-to-day operations. Leagues connects Trase OS to those environments and turns platform capabilities into solutions customers can use and trust.
This role exists to:
- Deliver working solutions that improve customer workflows and produce measurable outcomes.
- Bridge customer needs and platform engineering, identifying gaps early and shaping practical solutions.
- Turn successful deployments into reusable integrations and patterns that help future customers launch faster.
What makes this role challenging
- Customer environments vary in data quality, integration options, security requirements, and operational readiness.
- AI behavior must be evaluated against real workflows, including failure cases, escalation paths, and human review.
- You must balance delivery speed with reliability and maintainability, while deciding what belongs in a customer solution versus the shared platform.
Responsibilities
- Work directly with customers to map workflows, identify useful AI applications, and agree on scope, success measures, and acceptance criteria.
- Build production-quality agents, applications, APIs, and integrations using Trase OS, including backend services and user interfaces as needed.
- Integrate customer systems, data sources, and identity providers; work with infrastructure engineers to deploy in customer or Trase-managed environments.
- Own delivery through testing, deployment, customer validation, and operational handoff. Surface dependencies, risks, and scope changes early.
- Build evaluations, automated tests, observability, and human review or escalation into agent workflows; validate quality, latency, cost, and reliability.
- Apply appropriate access controls, data-handling policies, and audit logging in partnership with Security and customer teams.
- Debug production issues across application, data, integration, and infrastructure layers; document solutions and create practical runbooks.
- Contribute reusable components and product feedback to Origin and Arena; collaborate on platform improvements rather than maintaining unnecessary custom implementations.
Requirements
- Experience building and shipping production software, with strong coding, testing, debugging, and API design fundamentals.
- Proficiency in a modern language such as Python, Java or TypeScript, and experience with databases, backend services, and external integrations.
- Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure, containers, CI/CD, and monitoring; ability to troubleshoot deployed applications.
- Ability to translate customer needs into implementable work and communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Practical understanding of LLM applications or AI agents, including their limitations, evaluation, and safe interaction with customer data and systems.
- Ownership of delivery and quality, curiosity about customer operations, and comfort working through incomplete requirements.
Nice to Have
- Experience as a forward deployed, product, full stack, or solutions engineer with substantial production coding responsibility.
- Domain experience in healthcare, SLED, financial services, or retail; familiarity with sensitive data and regulated customer environments.
- Experience with agent orchestration, retrieval, LLM evaluations, enterprise identity, or complex enterprise integrations.
Expectations by level:
- Engineer II (L4): Deliver scoped features and integrations with guidance; contribute to customer discovery, testing, and production troubleshooting.
- Senior Engineer (L5): Independently lead a customer workstream from discovery to production, make design decisions, and mentor engineers.
- Staff Engineer (L6): Lead complex deployments and architecture across teams, resolve broader technical risks, and establish reusable patterns across Leagues.
If you want to be on the cutting edge of technology, building AI solutions for the future, and are up for a challenge, let’s talk!
Salary Range: $150,000-240,000. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.
Some travel to customers may be required.
Our Trase Benefits:
For full-time roles only
- Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement with strong performance as the firm grows
- 100% employer paid, comprehensive health care including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family.
- Paid maternity and paternity for 14 weeks at employees' normal pay.
- Unlimited PTO, with management approval.
- Opportunities for professional development and continued learning.
- Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives available.
- Mental health benefits are available through Tara Mind.
We’re an Equal Opportunity Employer: You’ll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability.
Applicant Data Disclosure
By submitting an application, you acknowledge that Red Cell Partners, LLC ("Red Cell") uses third-party service providers to facilitate its recruitment and hiring processes. These providers include applicant tracking systems, candidate verification platforms, and fraud detection tools (collectively, "Hiring Platforms"). Your application materials, including your résumé, cover letter, work samples, responses to application questions, and any other information you submit, may be transmitted to and processed by these Hiring Platforms for the following purposes:
Managing and administering your application throughout the hiring process;
Verifying the accuracy and authenticity of application materials, including by cross-referencing information you provide against publicly available sources and proprietary databases;
Identifying indicators of potentially fraudulent, fabricated, or materially misleading application content, including but not limited to discrepancies between submitted materials and publicly available professional profiles, geographic anomalies, and fabricated work histories.
Applications that are flagged through this process as containing indicators of fraud or material misrepresentation may be declined from further consideration. If you have questions about the status of your application or the evaluation process, please contact**talent@redcellpartners.com.
Red Cell requires its Hiring Platform providers to process your information solely for the purposes described above and in accordance with applicable law. Your information will be retained only for as long as necessary to fulfill these purposes and any applicable legal obligations, after which it will be deleted in accordance with Red Cell's data retention policies.
For more information about how your data is used, please refer to our Privacy Policy and Applicant Privacy Notice.
Prep for this interview
5 questions likely to come up at Trase Systems, each matched to a line in this posting.
- 1Coding
They wrote: “Proficiency in a modern language such as Python, Java or TypeScript, and experience with databases, backend services, and external integrations.”
Here's a CSV export from a customer. Write a script that cleans it and loads it into our API.
How to answer
Why they ask: Very close to real FDE work. They watch how you handle bad rows and failures.
- Read with a proper CSV parser; check the header first
- Validate each row and collect errors, not crash on the first one
- Send in batches with retries and a clear report at the end
- Write one or two quick tests for the parsing
Tip: Talk through edge cases out loud: encodings, missing fields, duplicates, rate limits.
- 2Integrations and APIs
They wrote: “Build production-quality agents, applications, APIs, and integrations using Trase OS, including backend services and user interfaces as needed.”
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.
- 3LLMs, RAG and agents
They wrote: “Practical understanding of LLM applications or AI agents, including their limitations, evaluation, and safe interaction with customer data and systems.”
How do you know an LLM feature is good enough to ship?
How to answer
Why they ask: Evals are what separate a demo from production. Many roles list them by name.
- Write 50–200 real examples with expected outcomes, with customer experts
- Agree on a pass bar and the errors that are never acceptable
- Score automatically where possible; review a sample by hand
- Re-run on every prompt or model change, and watch live traffic after launch
Tip: Describe a test set built with the customer, a pass bar agreed up front, and checks that run on every change.
- 4Discovery and scoping
They wrote: “We are hiring at Mid, Senior and Staff levels. Level will reflect your demonstrated engineering depth, independence, and scope of ownership.”
How do you decide what to build first when a customer wants ten things?
How to answer
Why they ask: FDEs have limited weeks per customer. This tests judgment about value, effort and risk.
- Score each request by business value and by effort, with the customer in the room
- Pick one item that proves value fast and unblocks later work
- Write down what's out of scope so it doesn't creep back in
- Revisit the list after the first release, with real usage data
Tip: Show a simple way to rank the list and name what you'd leave out on purpose.
- 5Cloud, deployment and security
They wrote: “Customer environments vary in data quality, integration options, security requirements, and operational readiness.”
A bank wants our product inside their own cloud account, with no data leaving it. How do you approach it?
How to answer
Why they ask: Self-hosted and private-cloud deployments are common in regulated industries.
- Learn their rules early: network limits, approved services, review process
- Package the product so it installs the same way each time (containers, Terraform)
- Plan how you'll get logs and updates without touching their data
- Run a test install with them before the real one
Tip: Talk about the conversation with their security team as much as the setup.
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