Forward Deployed Engineer, GenAI at Turing

Forward Deployed Engineer — Data Engineering & GenAI | Full Time | Washington, DC Metro Area (Hybrid, 2–3 days on-site) | U.S. Citizenship Required

Turing is seeking a Principal-level Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) with deep expertise in data engineering and Generative AI to work directly with customers, translating complex operational challenges into production-ready technical solutions. This is a hands-on, customer-facing engineering role — not a consulting or implementation position.

About the Role

You will operate at the intersection of software engineering, data pipelines, and Generative AI, engaging directly with customers to understand their needs and then building and deploying solutions yourself. Engagements may range from API integrations and ETL pipelines to LLM-powered agents and AI workflow automation.

Key Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers and senior stakeholders to understand business objectives, workflows, and pain points.
• Translate ambiguous requirements into concrete technical architectures and working solutions.
• Rapidly prototype, build, test, deploy, and iterate on customer-facing solutions end-to-end.
• Write production-quality code primarily in Python and/or TypeScript.
• Design and develop REST APIs, backend services, and integrations with databases, cloud services, and AI models.
• Design and implement ETL/ELT pipelines for ingestion, transformation, and delivery workflows (Parquet, CSV, JSON, etc.).
• Build GenAI-powered applications, including LLM-based agents, RAG pipelines, tool-calling workflows, and multi-step AI systems.
• Develop evaluation frameworks and feedback loops to measure and improve AI application quality.
• Apply sound engineering practices around testing, version control, CI/CD, monitoring, security, and documentation.

Required Qualifications

• 8–14 years of hands-on software and data engineering experience.
• Strong fundamentals in ETL/ELT, data modeling, schema mapping, and data pipelines.
• Experience designing and integrating REST APIs and backend services.
• Strong Python development skills.
• Hands-on experience building applications using LLMs / Generative AI (agents, RAG systems, tool-calling, AI workflow automation).
• Ability to independently turn ambiguous requirements into working technical solutions.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with demonstrated customer-facing experience.
• U.S. Citizenship required.
• Based in or willing to work from the Washington, DC metro area with hybrid presence 2–3 days/week.

Strongly Preferred

• Prior experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Architect, or customer-facing Software/Data Engineer.
• Experience supporting federal government, defense, intelligence, or national security environments.
• Cloud platform experience: AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Familiarity with modern data platforms: Snowflake, Databricks, Spark, Kafka, Airflow, dbt, or equivalents.
• Experience with vector databases, embeddings, retrieval systems, and LLM application frameworks.
• Experience deploying AI applications into production and designing human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Familiarity with enterprise security, authentication, authorization, and data governance requirements.