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David Careers

Forward Deployed Engineer (Agentic Systems) — Founding

Posted today

prentisBrooklyn (NY)
Computer Systems Engineers/ArchitectsCustom Computer Programming Services

SENIORITY

Lead

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About the role

About Us: Prentis is an AI research lab building computer-use models that perceive screens and operate software across browser, desktop and mobile. We deploy those models, and the researchers who trained them, into the operations that decide an enterprise's cost, speed and margin. To be considered for an interview, please make sure your application is full in line with the job specs as found below.
Position Overview: We’re hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to deploy autonomous AI agents into real enterprise workflows. This is a ship-the-product-in-the-field role: you’ll work directly with customers to map messy processes, build and integrate agentic systems (tools + planning + memory), and own production reliability end-to-end. We’re looking for someone with hands-on experience shipping agentic workflows (tools + planning + state/memory) and the engineering rigor to support them in production (evals + observability).
Role & Responsibilities
Core Responsibilities:
  • Own 0→1 enterprise deployments: discovery → prototype → production rollout → iterate until measurable ROIDesign and build agentic systems with tool calling, planning/execution loops, state/memory, and human-in-the-loop (HITL) controls
  • Implement reliability mechanisms: retries, timeouts, checkpointing, idempotency, and safe failure modes
  • Build enterprise integrations (e.g., Slack/Jira/Salesforce/ServiceNow/SQL/SharePoint/knowledge bases), including auth, permissions, and auditability
  • Create evaluation and monitoring systems: offline regression suites, dataset replay, and production quality/cost/latency dashboards
  • Debug real failures in production: non-determinism, flaky tools, prompt regressions, partial outages, and “agent got stuck” scenarios
  • Collaborate with the founding team to shape product roadmap, technical strategy, and deployment playbooks
  • Technical Problem Areas (Not Exhaustive)
  • Long-running agent workflows with persistent state and memory across sessions
  • Orchestration patterns for multi-step, multi-tool processes
  • Guardrails, verification, and human approval gates for high-stakes actions
  • Reliability + observability (tracing, structured logs, prompt/tool versioning, replay)
  • Enterprise security requirements: access control, audit logs, compliance constraints
  • Evaluation and benchmarking of agent performance in real production environments
Required Qualifications:
  • Proof you’ve shipped agentic systems: built and deployed at least one system that includes tool use + planning + state/memory + reliability mechanisms (work or OSS)
  • Experience with evaluation of LLM/agent behavior (task suites, regression tests, acceptance metrics, quality thresholds)
  • Production engineering mindset: tracing/logging, incident-style debugging, rollout/rollback strategies, versioning prompts/tools
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals (Python and/or TypeScript), API integrations, and systems thinking
  • Comfortable working directly with customers and owning outcomes end-to-end (Forward Deployed / customer-zero mentality)
  • Willingness to work onsite in Manhattan, New York
Preferred Qualifications:
  • Experience with agent frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, CrewAI, DSPy) in real deployments
  • Workflow engines for long-running processes (e.g., Temporal/Cadence, Airflow/Dagster as applicable)
  • Built agent observability: Open
  • Telemetry-style traces, replay pipelines, prompt/version registries, cost/latency instrumentation
  • Experience with enterprise software integration patterns and security/compliance constraints (PII, access control, auditability)
  • Familiarity with fine-tuning and adaptation methods (RAG, routing, lightweight fine-tunes, tool augmentation)
Who You Are:
  • You love deploying real systems into messy environments and iterating fast
  • You think in systems: failure modes, tradeoffs, correctness, reliability, scalability
  • You’re pragmatic and execution-oriented, but you care deeply about engineering quality
  • You’re excited about the limits of agents and motivated to push them responsibly in production
  • You can communicate clearly with both technical teams and enterprise stakeholders
What We Offer:
  • Competitive compensation + meaningful equity, aligned with early-stage risk/reward
  • Direct access to the founding team and high ownership from day one
  • Resources to ship: strong engineering support and the compute/tools needed to deploy real agentic systems
  • A high-velocity environment where you’ll help define the product, the architecture, and the deployment playbook
  • Benefits and perks will be finalized as we scale, and we’ll share specifics during the process
  • Culture & Environment
  • Direct access to the founding team and fast, collaborative decision-making
  • Opportunity to shape product direction and deployment strategy from day one
  • Fast-paced environment with high ownership and high impact
LocationOnsite in Manhattan, New York with core collaboration hours expected. We believe proximity matters for early-stage execution, especially while defining architecture, product, and deployment playbooks. Equal Opportunity We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. xuwmhxw We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds and are dedicated to fostering an equitable workplace.

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