SDE I - Forward Deployed Engineer

Pine Labs
Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India

🚀 We’re Hiring: Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) | AI, Agentic Systems & Software Engineering

Are you a strong software engineer who enjoys solving ambiguous, real-world business problems and turning them into production-ready technology?

We’re looking for Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) who combine:

💻 Strong software engineering

🤖 AI & Agentic Engineering

🧠 Product thinking

🔧 Hands-on problem solving

🤝 Customer & stakeholder collaboration

🏗️ End-to-end ownership

🔹 What You’ll Do

As an FDE, you’ll take ownership of complex problems — from discovery → solution design → prototype → implementation → production deployment → continuous improvement.

You will:

  • Work directly with customers, product teams, business stakeholders, and engineering teams to understand complex problems and translate them into technical solutions.
  • Build production-grade applications, backend services, APIs, integrations, and AI-powered workflows.
  • Design and develop AI agents and agentic workflows using LLMs, tool/function calling, APIs, RAG, MCP, and emerging AI technologies.
  • Integrate solutions with internal platforms and external enterprise systems.
  • Rapidly prototype ideas and convert successful prototypes into scalable production systems.
  • Debug complex issues across applications, APIs, infrastructure, data, models, and third-party integrations.
  • Make pragmatic architectural decisions balancing scalability, reliability, security, latency, cost, and time-to-market.
  • Determine when to use deterministic software vs. AI/LLM-based approaches.
  • Implement guardrails, authorization, observability, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop mechanisms for AI systems.
  • Work effectively with incomplete requirements and evolving customer needs.
  • Communicate technical trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

🔹 Strong Software Engineering Fundamentals

We’re looking for hands-on experience with:

  • Python, Java, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, or equivalent
  • APIs, databases, distributed systems, and backend architecture
  • Production-grade applications and services
  • Debugging and troubleshooting
  • Authentication & authorization
  • Security, scalability, reliability, observability, and performance
  • Quickly understanding unfamiliar codebases, APIs, and systems

🔹 AI & Agentic Engineering

Hands-on experience or strong practical understanding of:

  • Large Language Models (LLMs)
  • LLM APIs & SDKs
  • AI agents & agentic workflows
  • Tool/function calling
  • Prompt & context engineering
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Model evaluation & quality measurement
  • Guardrails & hallucination mitigation
  • Agent state, memory & orchestration
  • Human-in-the-loop workflows
  • Model cost, latency & accuracy trade-offs

Experience with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, LangGraph, MCP, or similar AI/agent frameworks is highly desirable.

💡 We value engineers who understand when NOT to use an LLM just as much as those who know how to use one.

🔹 Enterprise Integration & Architecture

Experience with some of the following is highly desirable:

  • REST / GraphQL APIs
  • Webhooks & event-driven architectures
  • Messaging / queueing systems
  • SQL / NoSQL databases
  • OAuth / OIDC & enterprise authentication
  • SaaS & enterprise system integrations
  • Cloud platforms & containerized environments
  • Microservices & distributed systems

🔹 What Makes a Strong FDE?

We’re particularly interested in engineers who:

  • Are comfortable operating with ambiguity and incomplete requirements.
  • Ask the right questions before jumping into implementation.
  • Can independently convert a business problem into a working technical solution.
  • Are equally comfortable discussing requirements with customers and debugging code with engineers.
  • Have strong product judgment and focus on solving the underlying problem — not just implementing requested features.
  • Can rapidly learn unfamiliar technologies and systems.
  • Prefer building and validating solutions over producing lengthy theoretical designs.
  • Take end-to-end ownership and remain accountable after the solution reaches production.
  • Balance engineering quality with practical delivery timelines.
  • Communicate complex technical concepts clearly and confidently.

🔹 Required Experience

1–3 years of software engineering experience for FDE roles.

Additionally:

  • Experience delivering customer-facing or enterprise solutions
  • Experience taking a product/system from concept or prototype to production
  • Experience in fast-moving product, platform, fintech, SaaS, AI, or enterprise technology environments
  • Experience working directly with enterprise customers or business stakeholders is an advantage
  • Experience building AI-powered products or production agentic systems is a strong advantage

The successful candidate should be capable of:

Understanding the problem → Designing the solution → Writing the code → Integrating systems → Deploying → Debugging production issues → Improving the product

👉 The ability to build is fundamental to this role.

🔹 Ideal Candidate

The ideal FDE is a combination of:

Strong Software Engineer + Pragmatic Solution Architect + Product Thinker + Customer-Facing Problem Solver

You should enjoy being given a difficult problem with no obvious solution and being responsible for figuring out:

What needs to be built → How to build it → How to deploy it → How to make it work in the real world.

🔹 What You Should Be Comfortable With

🏢 Working from the office 5 days a week

⚡ Working in a fast-paced, high-impact engineering environment

🚀 Challenging conventional thinking and driving innovation

🎯 Taking end-to-end ownership of complex problems

🔹 What We Value

🚀 You Take the Shot

Make decisions with confidence and execute with speed.

🎯 You Own It

Act like the CEO of your work — taking complete ownership and accountability.

🎨 You Craft with Pride

Continuously learn, strive for excellence, and take pride in building secure, scalable, world-class products.

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