AWS is hiring Senior Forward Deployed Engineers at $168K–$261K to lead multi-workstream customer AI programs

AWS has an open Senior Forward Deployed Engineer posting that places engineers inside strategic enterprise customers to design, build, deploy, and run AI-powered production systems. Travel is listed at 30–50%. Base ranges by location include East Palo Alto $193,300–$261,500, New York $184,900–$250,200, and Boston, Herndon, and Seattle $168,100–$227,400, plus sign-on and RSUs.

The senior bar is explicit: lead technical delivery across multi-workstream customer AI programs, make architecture decisions that span services and org boundaries, and define eval frameworks, observability, and production readiness for agentic and retrieval systems. Seniors are also expected to mentor junior FDEs, shape hiring, and turn engagement patterns into reusable practice mechanisms that feed back into AWS services.

Basic qualifications include 5+ years of professional software development and architecture leadership, experience communicating with senior stakeholders, and production-scale agentic or spec-driven development plus AI tooling (evals, RAG, prompts). Preferred experience includes enterprise AI/ML deployments, AWS services, React/TypeScript/Python/Go, and startup-like ownership.

For candidates watching the AWS FDE build-out, this post clarifies the senior IC track: not only shipping customer AI, but standardizing how the practice operates across accounts.