About the Position

Forward Deployed Engineer

San Francisco, California

AI Data Opportunities – Applied AI & Research

Permanent - Regular Full-time

Hybrid

Role Purpose

The Forward Deployed Engineer works directly with enterprise clients to design, deploy, and optimize GenAI data solutions, with full ownership of final delivered data quality. Embedded across engineering, data operations, and client delivery, this role ensures datasets, pipelines, workflows, and automations meet defined accuracy, reliability, and performance requirements for GenAI model development.

Responsibilities

Act as a trusted consultative partner to clients by defining requirements, clarifying success criteria, shaping high-quality annotation guidelines, and proactively providing insights.
Influence the what and the why behind GenAI data solutions by translating ambiguous client needs into clear, scalable workflows.
Deliver GenAI datasets that meet all defined acceptance and quality criteria.
Define the validation and automation requirements that reduce variance, manual review effort, rework, and time to validation.
Partner with engineering to build requirements as scalable, reproducible, and observable pipelines.
Contribute reusable quality frameworks and validators adopted across multiple projects.

Requirements

3+ years of experience in a customer-facing technical role such as solutions engineering, solutions architect, data or technical consulting, or data operations.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Experience working on GenAI, machine learning, or model evaluation data, including LLM training, annotation, or evaluation workflows.
A consultative problem-solving approach when leading client conversations, asking sharp questions, and guiding stakeholders toward better decisions.
Ability to vibe code but proficiency in Python and SQL is a plus.
Confidence in working directly with client engineering or machine learning teams.

Location and Work Arrangement

This is a hybrid role based in San Francisco, CA. You will be required to work from our San Francisco office two days per week.

Salary

$150,000 - $200,000 a year

The total target compensation for this full-time role is inclusive of base salary and performance-based incentive. Actual compensation is determined based on role, level, experience, and technical expertise. Appen offers a comprehensive benefits package, including medical, dental, and vision coverage, retirement plan options, and paid time off.

Why You’ll Love Working Here

At Appen, we foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence. We value curiosity, accountability, and a commitment to delivering the highest-quality AI solutions for frontier models.

You’ll work on complex challenges that shape the future of AI across industries and geographies, alongside talented people in a culture that values humility over ego. You’ll have the flexibility to deliver in a way that works for you and your team, supported by tools, resources, and development opportunities to continue to build your capability over time.

About the Company

Appen has been a leader in AI training data for over 30 years. We specialize in human-generated data to train, fine-tune, and evaluate models across generative AI, large language models, computer vision, and speech recognition. Our AI-assisted data annotation platform and global crowd of more than 1 million contributors in over 200 countries support model pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, evaluation and benchmarking, safety and red teaming, and multilingual global expansion.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

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Forward Deployed Engineer

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