Forward Deployed Engineer

About Enlighten

At Enlighten, we believe AI should expand what people can take on. We build teams of AI agents alongside Fortune 500 companies so they can put their best thinking to work across the business. We want the people closest to the work to be able to ask hard questions and get answers they can trust. Our mission is to give every team the intelligence it needs to make decisions that shape the business.

Benefits

Eligible employees can enroll in medical, dental, and vision coverage.

About the role

You'll build software alongside customers and see firsthand how they use it. You'll own a piece of the deployment from investigation through handoff, working with senior engineers on decisions that affect the broader system.

What you'll do

• Work with customers and delivery leads to understand what users need to do, what data is available, and how they'll know the solution works.
• Build and test the APIs, data mappings, and application features that deliver agent-generated insights into existing customer workflows.
• Run multiple AI agents in parallel every day to map unfamiliar systems and prototype fixes. Build custom apps for data checks, troubleshooting, or repeatable customer tasks, and verify the results before handing them off.
• Reproduce and diagnose issues across APIs, datasets, and applications. Share what you've verified and propose a fix.
• Write meaningful tests and clear handoff notes. Flag scope changes, access needs, and production risks early, and share fixes other deployments can reuse.
• Implement regression checks using the analysts’ expected results. Make saved analyses rerunnable with the same checks, and trace failures across source data, agent runs, and the customer-facing output.

What you bring

• Experience shipping working software, with examples of problems you personally investigated and delivered through completion.
• Working proficiency in Python or TypeScript, SQL, APIs, and modern software development practices.
• Comfort learning unfamiliar data platforms, applications, and customer workflows.
• Practical use of multiple AI agents and the ability to build a small custom app or automation with their help.
• The judgment to verify generated code and data outputs, protect customer information, and seek review when a change warrants it.
• Clear written and spoken communication with teammates and customers.
• Initiative, persistence, and a willingness to take ownership of a defined outcome while sharing progress and blockers early.
• Experience with cloud platforms, data warehouses, or customer-facing technical delivery.
• Experience with React, FastAPI, automated testing, or AI workflow orchestration.
• A small app, automation, or open-source contribution you can explain and demonstrate.
• You work independently. You can take an unclear goal, decide what to do first, find what you need, and carry the work through to a result. You bring people in early when a decision, risk, or dependency needs their input.

How we work

AI agents are core to how we get work done. You'll spend a substantial part of your day running multiple agents in parallel, building tools and workflows with them, and checking what they produce. You own the result. Verify the facts, calculations, code, and claims before they go into a decision, a customer conversation, or a release.

When working with clients, take initiative within the agreed goals, scope, access permissions, and review process. Bring options and recommendations, and involve the right people before changing a customer commitment or production workflow.

What success looks like

• You deliver scoped customer workflows that work against the agreed data and acceptance criteria.
• Your code, tests, and documentation make the work straightforward to review and maintain.
• You resolve unfamiliar problems with increasing independence and make good use of senior review.
• Your agents and custom tools remove repetitive work without introducing unchecked outputs.

Pay range

Chicago, IL: 135,000 - 175,000 USD per year