Forward Deployment Engineer, AI - US Remote

$120K - $140K Remote Mid Level AI/ML Engineer

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Skills & Technologies

AwsPython

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

#### What is PerfectServe?

PerfectServe is a leading provider of clinical communication and physician scheduling solutions in the health IT space. The company was founded in 1997 and has grown steadily since then, with a notable jump after several major acquisitions were announced in 2019\. PerfectServe now has 400\+ employees, 30,000\+ customers — spanning medical practices, hospitals, and health systems — and $100 million\+ in annual revenue.

PerfectServe's mission is to accelerate speed to care by optimizing provider schedules and routing communications — including messages, pages, calls, and alerts — to the right place at the right time in any care setting. By facilitating real\-time information sharing, building better schedules, and automating important clinical workflows, we believe we can help our customers advance patient care and improve the well\-being of their clinicians.

Leading analyst firms like Gartner® and KLAS Research have consistently validated our approach:

  • In 2026, PerfectServe was named highest in execution and furthest in vision in the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Clinical Communication and Collaboration — the clear segment leader.
  • PerfectServe also received two Best in KLAS awards in 2026 — one for physician scheduling and another for ambulatory clinical communications. That makes for 11 Best in KLAS awards over the past 9 years.

At PerfectServe, you'll have a unique opportunity to join a collaborative team with decades of experience that finds new ways to delight our customers every day. This involves consistent efforts to stay on the cutting edge of product development, which includes everything from implementing AI in new and existing solutions to brainstorming with customers about novel workflows. But you don't have to be in product to make in impact — everybody at PerfectServe contributes to important work that moves the business forward.

If you're looking for a well\-established, tech\-forward company full of smart people doing meaningful work, you've found the right place!

PerfectServe is a leading healthcare communications platform that connects providers, patients, and care teams to improve clinical collaboration and patient outcomes. We are seeking a Forward Deployment Engineer, AI, to join our R\&D organization. This is a core, high\-impact role responsible for deploying our AI product to new customers, reducing the effort it takes to bring each customer live, and continuously optimizing and extending our AI offerings.

Essential Functions:

  • Help configure and rollout customers of our existing AI voice agent
  • Build and run evaluation suites to validate behavior, catch regressions, and tune prompts as new customers are deployed
  • Develop new features and fixes to the core product
  • Optimize latency, inference cost, and hallucination guardrails
  • Run and improve model evaluation, benchmarking, and observability across the product
  • Monitor cost controls, usage monitoring, and security/PHI handling constraints
  • Partner with Product and Customer Success to turn customer requirements into working, validated deployments, and own customer go\-live, post\-launch monitoring, and production issue debugging
  • Help streamline and automate the onboarding process to reduce the engineering effort

required to bring each new customer live

Qualifications:

  • 3\+ years software engineering experience with strong Python backend skills
  • 1\+ years of production experience with LLM APIs, deploying and supporting GenAI systems at scale
  • Cloud\-native architecture experience, preferably AWS
  • Experience in regulated or security\-conscious environments
  • Product\-minded systems thinker, comfortable with ambiguity and executive communication
  • Experience with voice or conversational AI a plus
  • Comfortable translating non\-technical customer requirements into working configuration

Why Join PerfectServe?

At PerfectServe, we are transforming healthcare communication and collaboration to help clinicians deliver better care. You'll work with a dedicated and mission\-driven team in an environment that values growth, transparency, and innovation.

We offer a salary range of $120,000 to $140,000 USD per year, with compensation tailored to your background, strengths, and potential to grow within the team. The salary range listed for this role reflects our commitment to pay transparency and is based on market data, internal equity, and the scope of responsibilities. compensation will be determined by a combination of factors, including the candidate's experience, skills, and the specific team or product area they support. We regularly review compensation across the company to ensure fairness and consistency. If you are a current employee and have questions about how your compensation aligns with our ranges, we encourage you to speak with your manager or People Operations.

#### Benefits:

  • Remote first work environment
  • Health, Dental, Vision, Life and Disability Insurance options available day one.
  • 401K \- with match and immediately vested.
  • 17 company holidays, 2 floating holidays plus competitive paid time off policy
  • Internal Advancement Opportunities

PerfectServe offers unified healthcare communication solutions to help physicians, nurses, and care team members provide exceptional patient care. PerfectServe's cloud\-based solutions enhance patient safety and reduce provider burnout by automating workflows, speeding time to treatment, optimizing shift schedules, empowering nurse mobility, and engaging patients in their own care.

Salary Context

This $120K-$140K range is in the lower quartile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $175K across 2162 roles with salary data).

View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →

Role Details

Company PerfectServe
Title Forward Deployment Engineer, AI - US Remote
Location Remote, US
Category AI/ML Engineer
Experience Mid Level
Salary $120K - $140K
Remote Yes

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 4,317 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At PerfectServe, 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

Aws (28% of roles) Python (52% 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 $214,900 based on 6,420 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $194,400. This role's midpoint ($130K) sits 40% below the category median. Disclosed range: $120K to $140K.

Across all AI roles, the market median is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($287,500) and Research Engineer ($272,100). By seniority level: Entry: $110,000; Mid: $194,400; Senior: $227,400; Director: $274,554; VP: $241,000.

PerfectServe AI Hiring

PerfectServe has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Remote, US. Compensation range: $140K - $140K.

Remote Work Context

Remote AI roles pay a median of $180,000 across 1,196 positions. About 15% of all AI roles offer remote work.

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 4,317 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 138 entry-level, 2,071 mid-level, 1,655 senior, and 453 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (635 positions). The remaining 3,657 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.

The market median for AI roles is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($287,500 median, 34 roles); Research Engineer ($272,100 median, 227 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($244,000 median, 23 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 4,317 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (3,004), Data Scientist (345), AI Software Engineer (309). 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 (138) are outnumbered by mid-level (2,071) and senior (1,655) 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 453 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.

Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (635 positions), with 3,657 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 $215,000. Top-quartile roles start at $266,300, and the 90th percentile reaches $320,790. 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 Safety roles lead at $287,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $145,000. 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 (2,249 postings), Aws (1,224 postings), Azure (938 postings), Rag (915 postings), Gcp (660 postings), Pytorch (640 postings), Prompt Engineering (624 postings), Kubernetes (559 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 6,420 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for AI/ML Engineer positions is $214,900. 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 15% of the 4,317 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.
PerfectServe 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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