Forward Deployed Engineer (AI)

About the Position

Forward Deployed Engineer (AI)

Whitesmith is an AI-first technical partner with deep roots in senior software engineering. We help established organizations make AI part of how their teams actually work: not a slide deck or an isolated proof of concept, but working systems with measurable value and people who can keep improving them.

We are hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer who wants to learn how to solve hard problems together with users, client engineers, and our Engagement Lead. You do not need every answer upfront; you need to own the next responsible step and the system you build.

You will work directly with users and client engineers across multiple workstreams and clients alongside a Whitesmith AI Engagement Lead. Allocation will reflect planned delivery days, technical complexity, support commitments, and the cost of switching context. You will take a shaped but still ambiguous problem from workflow discovery through a useful prototype, production, or regular operational use, and the iteration loop that keeps it working.

This is not a demo-engineering, support, or ticket-delivery role. You will write production code, integrate with real systems, define evaluations and guardrails, debug failures, and help people adopt what you build.

As the primary technical point of contact for your assigned workstreams, you will earn the trust of CTOs, technical stakeholders, and engineering teams through engineering depth, delivery speed, and sound technical judgment. You need the curiosity to understand work that is not yours yet and the ability to explain your technical decisions clearly.

Responsibilities

• The working system: Build the smallest useful version that runs the whole workflow, then harden what earns the right to stay. Work across application code, APIs, data, automation, and agentic workflows as the problem requires.
• Technical discovery: Sit with users, inspect the existing workflow, and find the constraints hidden by the first brief. Turn them into a technical plan, acceptance criteria, and a fast learning sequence.
• AI quality: Define what good looks like. Build evaluations, tests, observability, fallbacks, and human controls appropriate to the consequence of failure. Treat fluent output as unverified output.
• Integration and production: Work within the client’s identity, security, data, and infrastructure constraints. Make deliberate trade-offs across quality, latency, cost, maintainability, and speed.
• Adoption and handoff: Watch how the system behaves in real work. Train the team, write the runbook, and make the client progressively less dependent on you.
• The reusable pattern: Turn useful field learning into Whitesmith skills, knowledge, evaluation sets, templates, and building blocks. Resist one-off complexity when a simpler or reusable path exists.

Requirements

• Experience: You have shipped production software to real users and can explain your personal contribution from architecture through operation.
• Skills: Strong in Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, or a comparable production stack, and comfortable across APIs, data, authentication, cloud systems, and debugging.
• AI Knowledge: You have built useful systems with LLMs or agents and understand prompting/context, tool use, retrieval where appropriate, evaluation, and common failure modes.
• Adaptability: You can move from an unfamiliar business workflow to a working vertical slice without waiting for a perfect specification.
• AI Use: You use AI deeply in your own engineering work. You can show where it accelerated you, where it failed, and how you verified the result.
• Communication: You communicate clearly with users, engineers, and leaders. You can say “this will not work as proposed” and bring a better path.
• Learning: You enjoy learning with others through unfamiliar problems, seek useful feedback, and keep improving the work after the novelty wears off.

We Offer

• Compensation: €38,000 to €47,000 gross annual salary, plus an annual benefits budget of €15,000 to €19,000, including meal allowance. Total annual package: €53,000 to €66,000. Profit sharing: in addition to salary and benefits, we share company profits with the team, equivalent to around 8% of annual gross salary on average. Final payouts depend on company results and the scheme’s allocation rules.
• Location: Portugal, remote-first
• Type: Full-time · 2 openings
• Travel: Occasional client travel, typically for discovery, building sessions, and important rollouts

About the Company

Whitesmith is an equal-opportunity employer. We welcome applicants with different backgrounds and will provide reasonable adjustments throughout the process. If an assessment constraint conflicts with an accessibility need, tell us, and we will agree on an equivalent way to demonstrate the skill.

How to Apply

To apply, use the application form below and upload a five-minute demo of work you personally own. No cover letter is needed. Sanitised private work and reasonable adjustments are welcome.

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