Forward Deployed Engineer

Role Overview

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you’ll embed with Rohirrim’s government and enterprise customers to turn cutting‑edge AI and retrieval into production-grade acquisition workflows. You’ll move fast from discovery to prototype to hardened deployment, integrate with real systems and data, and feed what you learn back into UAP product and roadmap. Expect hands-on work across the stack: ingestion pipelines, retrieval/evals, agent/tooling, UI glue, security/observability, and change management with real users.

This is a high-ownership, field-facing engineering role with regular on‑site collaboration at customer locations.

What You’ll Do

• Map critical workflows across seller and buyer journeys (capture → proposal; acquisition planning → award → contract actions) and define crisp success metrics (cycle time, win rate, compliance defect rate, throughput).
• Design → prototype → productionize AI-enabled workflows: retrieval pipelines, prompt/tool/agent orchestration, guardrails, structured extraction (clauses, SLAs, line items), and decision support—then harden for reliability, observability, and scale.
• Integrate deeply with enterprise systems and data sources:
  ERP/eProcurement (e.g., SAP/Oracle, Ariba, Coupa), CLM (e.g., Icertis/Apttus), CRM (Salesforce), IDP/SSO (Okta/Azure AD), DMS/Records (SharePoint/Box/OnBase), ticketing (Jira/ServiceNow), data lakes/warehouses—plus public systems (e.g., SAM.gov, contract catalogs) where appropriate.
• Stand up secure connectors and data contracts; implement RBAC, PII handling, tenant isolation, audit logging; work within restricted networks where necessary.
• Build evals & harnesses that capture real‑world quality (accuracy, latency, grounding, compliance), wire signals into iteration loops, and inform model/tooling choices.
• Operationalize adoption: run trainings, write crisp runbooks, and hand off durable playbooks to customer champions and to Rohirrim product/engineering so wins scale beyond one account.
• Surface field patterns (prompts, tools, workflows, failure modes) and translate them into platform components and roadmap bets.

Sample Problems You Might Tackle

• Seller side:
• • Auto-generate compliant proposal sections, resumes, and price narratives grounded in past performance and rate cards.
  • Build a compliance matrix against solicitation clauses; flag gaps and propose remediations.
  • Mine enterprise doc stores for relevant past work, resumes, and differentiators; assemble reusable libraries.
• Buyer side:
• • Draft solicitations (SOW/PWS), evaluation criteria, and source selection documents aligned to policy.
  • Summarize market research and vendor responses; structure technical/price evaluations with traceable rationales.
  • Extract, standardize, and monitor contract clauses, deliverables, and modifications across a portfolio.

What You’ll Bring

• Product-minded engineer with 5–10+ years building and shipping software to production (titles flexible); comfortable across APIs, data pipelines, backend services, and light UI glue.
• Hands-on with Python/TypeScript (or similar), modern cloud services, and telemetry/observability.
• Experience with LLM-enabled systems (RAG, tool use/agents, evals, guardrails) and data integration in messy enterprise environments.
• Strength in requirements discovery with non-technical stakeholders; you can turn ambiguous goals into shippable increments.
• Security-first mindset (RBAC, least privilege, data residency, auditability).
• Domain familiarity with acquisition/CLM/procurement/RFPs is a strong plus (FAR/DFARS knowledge, public-sector experience, or exposure to regulated industries).
• Ability to work on-site with customers as needed; some engagements may require additional screening. Clearance eligibility is a plus.

How You Will Make a 10× Impact

• High Beta: You assume volatility is normal, tackle the hardest risks first, and learn fast. You’re transparent about failure and avoid sunk-cost traps.
• Unreasonable Hospitality: You obsess over the user’s “why,” not just the “what,” ensuring we solve material problems in capture, sourcing, and contract management.
• Action, Action, More Action: You bias to shipping and real feedback over perfect plans; progress is what’s in production.
• Contrarian, with Common Sense: You challenge consensus, then pair bold ideas with pragmatic paths to value—especially in policy- and compliance-heavy environments.

How We Measure Success

• Time-to-value: weeks to first production workflow; median cycle-time reductions for target processes.
• Quality & compliance: eval pass rates, groundedness, and defect/exception trends.
• Adoption & scale: weekly active users, repeatable playbooks, and reusable platform components created.
• Business impact: win-rate lift (seller), award/obligation cycle-time reduction (buyer), cost avoidance and risk reduction.