Forward Deployed AI Engineer | San Diego, CA

The posting, as Go Cadre wrote it

About Cadre AI

Cadre AI is an AI strategy and integration firm that builds production AI systems for B2B companies in private equity, wholesale lending, real estate, and SaaS. We don’t build decks about what AI could do. We ship systems that move revenue, compress costs, and automate the work that used to take entire teams.

The Role

The Forward Deployed AI Engineer is a critical role at Cadre AI. You are the person in the room with the client, the person writing the code, and the person architecting the system. There is no handoff between “strategy” and “execution.” You own both.

You will embed directly with our clients to understand their operations, identify the highest-leverage AI opportunities, and then build and ship production systems that deliver measurable results. One week you might be designing an LLM pipeline that processes financial documents. The next, you’re standing up a voice agent for a construction company or building a revenue operations engine for a hardware manufacturer scaling globally.

This role is AI-first in how you work, not just what you build. You use Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and whatever tools let you ship quality code at a pace that would be impossible without them. Speed and quality are not tradeoffs here. They’re both the expectation.

What You’ll Do

Own Client Delivery End-to-End

• Embed with clients across private equity, lending, real estate, and SaaS to map their operations and identify the AI use cases that will move the business
• Run discovery sessions, translate business pain into technical architecture, scope the work, and then build it yourself
• Present to C-suite stakeholders, translating complex trade-offs into clear decisions with measurable expected outcomes
• Manage client relationships as a trusted technical partner, not a vendor. Clients should feel like you’re part of their team

Build and Ship Production AI Systems

• Architect and deploy LLM/RAG pipelines, agent orchestration systems, conversational AI, document intelligence, and predictive analytics
• Use AI-native development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) to write, review, and iterate on production code at startup speed
• Build evaluation frameworks, regression suites, and observability layers that prove your systems work and catch when they don’t
• Convert proofs-of-concept into stable, monitored production services. The demo is not the deliverable. The running system is
• Design and enforce data quality rules, ETL pipelines, and secure cloud deployments across AWS, GCP, and Azure

Drive Strategy and Scale the Practice

• Contribute to Cadre’s 8-pillar AI transformation framework, turning field learnings into repeatable playbooks
• Identify patterns across engagements and build reusable components, prompt libraries, and architecture templates that accelerate future pods
• Scout emerging models, tools, and research (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Llama, open-source). Run experiments and share what works with the team
• Men

[…]
saved, or time eliminated

• Experience in consulting, professional services, or client-facing engineering where you had to earn trust and deliver under pressure
• You’ve led end-to-end launches of agent-based or LLM systems at production scale, including the unglamorous work of error analysis, edge case handling, and monitoring
• Active in the AI community. You write, speak, contribute to open source, or build in public. You’re a practitioner, not a spectator
• Domain experience in financial services, real estate, lending, or B2B SaaS

Our Tech Stack

AI & LLM
LiteLLM, DSPy, Langfuse, Claude, GPT, custom agent frameworks

Backend
Typescript, Python, FastAPI

Frontend
React, Next.js, Vercel

Data
PostgreSQL with pgvector, Supabase

Infrastructure
AWS, Render (PaaS), Docker

Dev Tools
Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub

Why Cadre AI

• Real ownership. You will not be writing tickets for someone else to build. You scope it, build it, ship it, and see the impact with your own eyes
• Variety and velocity. Every engagement is a different industry, a different problem, and a new chance to build something that matters. You won’t get bored
• AI-native culture. We don’t just build AI for clients. We use it to run our own operations. You’ll work with people who are as obsessed with the tools as you are
• Access to the frontier. Through our partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI, and YC, you’ll be among the first to experiment with new models and capabilities
• Upside. We’re a bootstrapped, profitable, fast-growing company. Early team members share in the success they help create
• No bureaucracy. Small pods. Clear accountability. The best idea wins, regardless of who says it

Cadre AI is building the future of how companies adopt and operate AI. We believe the best AI systems come from engineers who understand both the technology and the business it serves. If that’s how you think, we want to talk.

Compensation
The base pay range for this role is $100,000 – $140,000 per year.