Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Job description

At Accenture Federal Services, nothing matters more than helping the US federal government make the nation stronger and safer and life better for people. Our 13,000+ people are united in a shared purpose to pursue the limitless potential of technology and ingenuity for clients across defense, national security, public safety, civilian, and military health organizations. Join Accenture Federal Services, a technology company within global Accenture. Recognized as a Glassdoor Top 100 Best Place to Work, we offer a collaborative and caring community where you feel like you belong and are empowered to grow, learn and thrive through hands-on experience, certifications, industry training and more. Join us to drive positive, lasting change that moves missions and the government forward! **About the APX Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) Program** APX (Advanced Partnership Accelerator) is a Center of Excellence under AFS’ Data & AI capability. The APX Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) Program represents a strategic initiative to position Accenture Federal Services at the forefront of artificial intelligence innovation in government. This program embeds elite technical talent directly with federal clients to accelerate the adoption and implementation of frontier AI capabilities from leading laboratories including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other cutting-edge AI partners. As an FDE, you will serve as the critical bridge between breakthrough AI technology and mission-critical federal applications. You'll work hands-on with the most advanced AI models available, translating their transformative potential into tangible value for defense, intelligence, civilian, and public health missions. This is not a traditional consulting role; FDEs are technical practitioners, innovators, and trusted advisors who operate at the cutting edge of what's possible with AI in highly regulated, high-security federal environments. **What You Will Do** The APX FDE program exists because federal missions cannot wait for slow, siloed development cycles. They need embedded engineers who move with urgency, autonomy, and precision. As an experienced hire, you will lead the rapid engineering, deployment, and scaling of mission-critical AI native solutions for the federal government. You will shape solution architectures, drive delivery for clients, and serve as the technical anchor embedded at the mission edge. **Lead and Drive Mission Embedded Build Teams** - Serve as the technical lead working within federal client teams, guiding engineering decisions in fast, complex conditions (e.g., autonomous AI at the edge) - Architect, build, and deploy rapid prototypes using frontier AI tools and frameworks - Translate complex, ambiguous mission problems into actionable technical roadmaps and implementable designs to build production-grade systems. - Support integration of AI-native solutions into diverse client environments, including legacy platforms, regulated data ecosystems, and classified environments - Operate across the tech stack, frontend, backend, APIs, orchestration layers, data pipelines, with autonomy and engineering depth - Drive development of applications and workflows that interact with structured and unstructured enterprise data at scale **Lead AI Native Engineering Practices** - Leverage advanced GenAI tooling, agentic frameworks, and autonomous workflows as core components of daily engineering delivery - Design and implement sophisticated GenAI solutions such as RAG architectures, semantic search systems, and agentic orchestration - Evaluate model performance, improve generations and pipelines, and uphold responsible AI practices in mission critical settings - Drive fast experimentation cycles, ensuring close operator feedback loops and rapid iteration **Delivery Excellence, Leadership, and Collaboration** - Set engineering direction for sprint cycles, mission outcomes, and client facing delivery expectations - Work on a team of FDEs on architecture, debugging patterns, quality engineering, and deployment best practices - Coordinate reach back to broader AFS resources to leverage the deep expertise across the firm on our client’s hardest problems. - Contribute to and refine APX reusable assets, accelerators, templates, and mission deployment playbooks - Surface mission feedback, field intelligence, friction points, and integration challenges to APX leadership to strengthen future delivery strategies - Serve as a technical representative in client working sessions, ensuring clarity, trust, and precise communication **What You Bring** - **Mission-first Mindset & Relentless Problem Solving:**You move fast because the mission can’t wait. You make smart bets in ambiguous terrain, taking ownership early and giving every challenge your full drive before ever considering stepping back. You push through ambiguity, communicate risks and trade-offs, investigate solutions independently to forge the future, and maintain momentum even when the path forward is unclear. - **Grit & Tenacity to Engineer at the Edge**: You remain steady when projects get messy and can keep pushing forward through rapid experimentation cycles. You show up confidently in client working sessions, support other FDEs at the mission edge, adapt in real time, and help teams operate decisively even in uncertainty. - **Bias for Building:**You iterate quickly, communicate plainly across technical and nontechnical teammates, ask sharp questions, and summarize decisions in a way that moves teams forward with confidence and alignment. You build work that adds value for our clients, making bold ideas happen fast. - **Limitless Curiosity & Frontier Learning:**You learn rapidly across a wide, rapidly changing technical frontier, from LLMs and agent frameworks to cloud platforms and enterprise AI ecosystems. You approach new tools with curiosity, adaptability, and velocity, and you prefer building and testing over long specification cycles. **Here’s What You Need** - Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional software engineering experience, including leading the design, build, and deployment of production systems - Experience working with technical engineering teams, providing clear direction, and ensuring smooth delivery in demanding environments across a wide range of mission needs - Strong proficiency in a general programming language like Python or Rust, with full stack capability across APIs, backend services, frontend interfaces, and orchestration layers - Demonstrated experience building AI native solutions, LLM applications, agentic workflows, RAG systems, or semantic/knowledge applications - Strong data engineering foundation with proficiency in database and ontology modeling, data modeling techniques, plus front-end awareness of how data structures shape user-facing functionality - Experience developing reliable data ingestion pipelines that gracefully exit, detect and mitigate schema evolution and integrate structured and unstructured data reliably - Must be a U.S. Citizen and ability to obtain a federal security clearance **Bonus Points if You Have** - Degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Applied Sciences or a related technical field - Deep familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and modern tech infrastructure patterns - Experience integrating/deploying solutions within constrained or legacy environments - Demonstrated ability to take concepts from zero to production ready systems independently - Working knowledge of platforms from frontier labs (Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Azure OpenAI, Claude, etc.) - Relevant Google, Anthropic, or OpenAI certifications or training courses - Ability to travel (up to 100%) depending on business need and client requirements