Forward-Deployed Engineer

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

We are looking for a Senior Forward-Deployed Engineer to join our Professional Services team. This role is focused on working directly alongside developer teams in our most strategic enterprise customers to drive transformational outcomes across frontend modernization, platform migrations, and AI adoption.

What it asks for · 12

• 6+ years of experience in software engineering with at least 2 years in a customer-facing technical role (consulting, solutions architecture, forward deployed engineering, or technical founder experience).
• Experience using AI instrumentation such as harnesses, skills, and MCPs to build and deploy web applications, backend systems, and/or agentic workflows.
• High agency with comfort in ambiguity - you thrive when given a problem to solve rather than a task to complete, and you can navigate complex organizations to create a plan and drive a project.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to conduct technical discovery, present to executives, mentor engineers, and build lasting customer relationships - all with a low-ego, collaborative approach.
• Business acumen to understand customer objectives, translate technical capabilities into ROI, and identify expansion opportunities throughout engagement lifecycles.
• Willingness to travel occasionally to customer sites for embedded work and relationship building.
• Expert-level TypeScript skills - You are fluent in TypeScript and have strong opinions on type safety, patterns, and tooling.
• Deep expertise in Next.js , with a proven track record of architecting and delivering complex applications using App Router, Server Components, server-side rendering (SSR), static generation (SSG), and incremental static regeneration (ISR), and personalization.
• Demonstrated experience leading frontend migrations - you've converted legacy applications to Next.js, navigated incremental adoption strategies, and understand the challenges of migrating large codebases in production environments.
• Mastery of React and its ecosystem, including advanced state management, performance optimization, and modern patterns like streaming, suspense, and concurrent features.
• Production experience with LLMs and AI applications , including agent development, cloud sandbox & filesystem agent patterns, human-in-the-loop patterns, and value optimization. Familiarity with Vercel's eve framework and AI SDK is strongly preferred.
• Ability to identify business cases for AI agents - many customers need guidance not only on how to build AI agents, but where and why to use AI. You’ll need to listen and understand a day-in-the-life of customers’ teams to build proposals.

Also a plus

• Have led enterprise AI transformation initiatives, including building production agents that automated manual processes or replaced legacy systems.
• Have taught others how to develop software using AI, best practices for building agents, harnesses, skills, and MCPs.
• Have led large-scale migrations from legacy frameworks (Create React App, Gatsby, custom webpack setups) to Next.js in enterprise environments.
• Have expertise in performance optimization and Core Web Vitals, with experience diagnosing and fixing LCP, CLS, and INP issues at scale.
• Have contributed to the Next.js, React, or AI SDK open-source projects, or maintain popular related libraries.
• Have experience with enterprise deployment patterns including security reviews, compliance requirements, and multi-region architectures.
• Have a background in financial services, healthcare, retail/e-commerce, or media - industries with complex frontend ecosystems and growing AI adoption.
• Have spoken at conferences or published thought leadership on frontend architecture, migrations, or AI applications.

What the job covers

• Build production AI solutions using Vercel's eve framework, AI SDK, and AI Cloud infrastructure, including conversational interfaces, production agents, MCP servers, and agentic workflows that transform customer operations.
• Lead complex frontend migrations - modernizing legacy React, Vue, or other frameworks to Next.js, including Pages to App Router transitions, incremental adoption strategies, and large-scale codebase transformations. Automation of migrations is key to engineering efficiency.
• Conduct code audits and help analyze and improve website performance , analyzing customer codebases for performance bottlenecks, architectural anti-patterns, and optimization opportunities - delivering actionable roadmaps that drive measurable improvements.
• Architect and implement high-performance Next.js applications , leveraging App Router, Server Components, streaming, ISR, and advanced rendering strategies to meet enterprise scale and performance requirements.
• Embed with strategic customers to build production applications - working within their systems, understanding their constraints, and shipping TypeScript code that goes live.
• Drive enablement and knowledge transfer through workshops, pair programming, and documentation - ensuring customer teams can extend and maintain solutions independently.
• Navigate complex enterprise environments by building relationships with stakeholders across engineering, product, and executive teams - translating technical capabilities into business outcomes.
• Contribute to our service evolution by identifying repeatable patterns, building reusable components, and sharing implementation insights back to Product and Engineering teams.

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• customer17×
• next.js12×
• agents10×
• applications9×
• build9×
• experience8×
• migrations8×
• production8×
• building7×
• enterprise7×
• complex6×
• engineering6×
• patterns6×
• performance6×
• technical6×
• code5×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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