Forward Deployed Engineer — Dynamo AI

$150K - $200K San Francisco, CA, US Mid Level AI/ML Engineer

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Skills & Technologies

Kubernetes

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

Forward Deployed Engineer — Dynamo AI

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Location: Remote (East Coast US or United Kingdom)

Compensation: $150,000 – $200,000 base \+ equity

Experience Level: 3–8 years

Employment Type: Full\-Time

### About Dynamo AI

Dynamo AI helps enterprises deploy AI systems that are reliable, secure, observable, scalable, and production\-ready. The company provides AI evaluation, observability, governance, and guardrail infrastructure for banks, insurance companies, government agencies, and other regulated enterprises. Products include DynamoEval, DynamoGuard, and AgentWarden.

### About the Role

This is a customer\-facing infrastructure engineering role owning 3–4 enterprise deployments simultaneously. You will deploy and operationalize AI systems in production environments, integrate Dynamo AI products into customer infrastructure, and bridge customer needs with product and engineering teams. The role requires deep Kubernetes and DevOps expertise with strong customer\-facing ownership.

### What You'll Own

  • Deploy and operationalize AI systems in production environments
  • Design enterprise deployment architectures
  • Integrate Dynamo AI products into customer infrastructure
  • Debug and troubleshoot deployment challenges
  • Work directly with engineering, security, compliance, and infrastructure teams
  • Translate customer deployment challenges into product feedback
  • Support AI governance, evaluation, and observability workflows
  • Own 3–4 customer deployments simultaneously
  • Bridge customer needs with product and engineering teams

### Requirements

  • 3–8 years of post\-undergraduate experience
  • Strong Kubernetes experience and networking expertise
  • DevOps and platform engineering experience
  • Distributed systems knowledge and API integration experience
  • Enterprise deployment experience with strong scripting skills
  • Customer\-facing engineering experience
  • Ability to work independently
  • Comfortable supporting East Coast US or UK customers
  • Available for occasional evening collaboration with India\-based teams

### Target Backgrounds

Strong signals include Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Implementation Engineer, AI infrastructure startup experience, Kubernetes production ownership, DevOps leadership, enterprise deployment experience, and regulated industry (financial services, healthcare, government) experience. Ideal roles: Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, Platform Engineer, DevOps Engineer, SRE, AI Infrastructure Engineer, Technical Implementation Engineer, or Enterprise Solutions Architect.

### Nice to Have

  • Master's degree in Computer Science or Engineering
  • Generative AI infrastructure or LLM deployment experience
  • Financial services, healthcare, or government technology experience
  • AI observability, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, or governance and compliance systems

### This Role Is NOT For

  • Traditional bank DevOps engineers or legacy enterprise IT backgrounds
  • Pure software engineers with no deployment experience
  • Candidates without customer\-facing experience
  • Big\-company\-only backgrounds without startup adaptation
  • Weak Kubernetes knowledge or limited infrastructure ownership

### Interview Process

  • Initial screen with Oliver Liu
  • Round 1 technical with Yash — Kubernetes, networking, DevOps
  • Round 2 mock customer deployment with Edwin — live Kubernetes deployment exercise, debugging and adaptation; AI tools allowed
  • Round 3 domain expertise and behavioral
  • Founder round
  • Offer

### Logistics

  • Role is fully remote — East Coast US or United Kingdom
  • Occasional evening availability required for collaboration with India\-based teams

Shortlisted candidates will be contacted by David Joseph \& Co., the recruiting partner managing this search on behalf of Dynamo AI.

Salary Context

This $150K-$200K range is below the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $181K across 1996 roles with salary data).

View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →

Role Details

Title Forward Deployed Engineer — Dynamo AI
Location San Francisco, CA, US
Category AI/ML Engineer
Experience Mid Level
Salary $150K - $200K
Remote No

About This Role

AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.

Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.

Across the 3,824 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 71% of the market. At David Joseph & Company, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.

Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.

What the Work Looks Like

A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.

Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.

Skills Required

Kubernetes (12% of roles)

Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.

Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.

Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.

Compensation Benchmarks

AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $178,940 based on 11,900 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $160,000. Disclosed range: $150K to $200K.

Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,000. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,380; Mid: $160,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $243,000; VP: $250,000.

David Joseph & Company AI Hiring

David Joseph & Company has 18 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI Product Manager, AI/ML Engineer, AI Software Engineer, AI Agent Developer. Positions span Philadelphia, PA, US, San Mateo, CA, US, Austin, TX, US. Compensation range: $165K - $350K.

Location Context

AI roles in San Francisco pay a median of $253,000 across 1,990 tracked positions. That's 26% above the national median.

Career Path

Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.

From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.

The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.

What to Expect in Interviews

Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.

When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.

AI Hiring Overview

The AI job market has 3,824 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 119 entry-level, 1,813 mid-level, 1,472 senior, and 420 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 16% of the market (613 positions). The remaining 3,187 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.

The market median for AI roles is $200,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,000. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 31 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 51 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 401 roles).

Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.

The AI Job Market Today

The AI job market spans 3,824 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,702), Data Scientist (281), AI Software Engineer (258). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.

The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (119) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,813) and senior (1,472) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 420 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.

Remote work availability sits at 16% of all AI roles (613 positions), with 3,187 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.

AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $200,000. Top-quartile roles start at $253,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $307,500. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.

Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $142,800. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.

The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,968 postings), Aws (1,203 postings), Azure (882 postings), Rag (877 postings), Gcp (735 postings), Prompt Engineering (587 postings), Pytorch (586 postings), Claude (554 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.

Frequently Asked Questions

Based on 11,900 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for AI/ML Engineer positions is $178,940. Actual compensation varies by seniority, location, and company stage.
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
About 16% of the 3,824 AI roles we track offer remote work. Remote availability varies by company and seniority level, with senior and leadership roles more likely to offer location flexibility.
David Joseph & Company is among the companies actively hiring for AI and ML talent. Check our company profiles for detailed breakdowns of open roles, salary ranges, and hiring trends.
Common next steps from AI/ML Engineer positions include ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer. Progression depends on whether you lean toward technical depth, people management, or product strategy.

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