Forward Deployed Engineering
Senior Engineer
Bring your engineering experience to AI delivery. Work with clients to design and build production software, own the technical decisions and keep improving it once it's in use.
New Zealand or Australia · Remote / Hybrid
Apply for This RoleYour Role at ELab AI
You'll work alongside our technical co-founder, Franco, to turn client requirements into working software. Our advisors lead discovery. You take the technical work forward, designing the solution with the client and owning it through deployment, handover and ongoing improvement.
What You'll Do
Build for Production
Develop applications, AI agents and integrations that work with a client's existing tools. Take responsibility for testing, deployment, monitoring and the production issues that follow.
Make the Technical Calls
Choose the architecture, model and cloud environment to suit the work. Explain trade-offs in reliability, latency and cost to both technical and business stakeholders.
Protect Client Information
Design access controls and data boundaries for sensitive environments. Work through identity, permissions and regional hosting requirements before deploying.
Work Alongside Clients
Understand the workflow your software supports. Present your approach, test it with the people using it and leave them with clear documentation and a working handover.
Improve How We Build
Turn lessons from delivery into reusable components and engineering practices. Use AI development tools deliberately, review the code and verify the result.
What You'll Bring
- You've built and operated production applications, including maintaining them after the initial release.
- You bring strong Python skills and depth in another production language, with experience across application development, data engineering or cloud infrastructure.
- You've built with LLM APIs, tool calling or agent workflows, and understand how to evaluate output quality and handle failure.
- You can deploy cloud infrastructure and reason about identity, networking, security and cost. We aren't looking for one particular cloud vendor.
- You use AI in your engineering workflow and can explain how you review, test and take responsibility for its output.
- You're comfortable explaining technical choices to clients and taking a piece of work through to completion.
Useful Experience
These would give you a head start. You don't need every one.
- MCP servers, retrieval over business documents and data pipelines.
- Microsoft 365, SharePoint or Power Platform integrations.
- Financial services, healthcare or other environments with sensitive information.
- Consulting, forward deployed engineering or products you've built independently.
Let's Talk About Your Next Step.
Tell us about something you've built and owned in production: the problem, the technical decisions you made and what you learned after launch. Include your CV or profile, and a code or project link if you can share one.
Please leave out confidential client information. A description of your contribution is enough.
Apply by EmailSend to careers@elab.co.nz with the role in your subject line.
The First Conversation
We'll start with a conversation about your experience and what you're looking for. The engineering process includes a practical technical exercise, scoped to around two hours, followed by a discussion of your approach and a conversation with the team.