Forward Deployed Engineer (Model Customization and Optimization), AWS Forward Deployed Engineering

As a Forward Deployed Engineer II (FDE II) on the Custom Model and Optimization team, you embed directly with strategic customers to build, optimize, and run custom generative AI models in production alongside their engineering teams. You own complete model workstreams end-to-end from defining the evaluation bar and preparing data, through training and inference optimization, to production deployment.

FDE IIs on this team works at the intersection of models and systems. They customize state-of-the-art open-weight and foundation models for new domains, languages, and modalities; migrate and optimize training and inference workloads on AWS Trainium and operate those models as production services. They are autonomous contributors who take on projects where the business goal is clear, but the path is not. They make design trade-offs with appropriate guidance, limit short-term workarounds, coach others on producing high-quality code, and train new team members.

Basic qualifications

• Experience in professional, non-internship software development
• Experience programming with at least one modern language such as Java, C++, or C# including object-oriented design
• 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• 2+ years of experience working in an Agile, startup, or rapidly scaling environment
• Hands-on experience with generative AI technology, such as LLMs, vision-language models, or speech models
• Experience with AI tools: eval frameworks, agent tooling, RAG pipelines, and prompt engineering
• Experience communicating technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences