Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Baker Tilly Advisory Group, LP is building the founding team for the AI Product Group (APG) Agent Factory, focused on designing, developing, and deploying AI-powered applications and intelligent agentic workflows. This hands-on role supports Tax, Assurance, and Advisory with production-ready engineering, evaluation-driven development, and close collaboration with practitioners and subject matter experts. The position is based in San Francisco, CA (onsite) and is geared toward measurable, reliable AI outcomes.

What you’ll do

• Build, implement, and maintain AI agents and multi-step workflows, including task decomposition, orchestration, context and memory management, tool integration, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and failure handling.
• Develop production-quality applications across backend services, APIs, data models, dashboards, conversational interfaces, and user-facing workflows.
• Partner directly with Tax, Assurance, and Advisory professionals to understand business processes, identify automation opportunities, and translate domain expertise into actionable requirements and working software.
• Define measurable hypotheses, testing criteria, evaluation frameworks, and performance baselines to validate AI capabilities and inform technical decisions prior to production deployment.
• Create and maintain automated tests, regression suites, and ground-truth datasets with subject matter experts to support reliability, accuracy, and continuous improvement.
• Own solutions end to end, from initial development and deployment through monitoring, troubleshooting, and ongoing enhancements to support adoption and positive user outcomes.
• Integrate AI applications with enterprise systems, APIs, and governed data sources using established integration standards, secure access controls, and data contracts.
• Contribute shared technical patterns, reusable components, documentation, and engineering best practices to enable consistent and scalable development across the Agent Factory.
• Work with external engineering partners to acquire specialized expertise and transition solutions into internally owned production environments, including maintainable code, tests, and operational documentation.
• Collaborate with U.S. and India engineering teams, product management, design, data platform, and enterprise architecture to align solutions and maintain consistent engineering standards.
• Use user feedback, application performance data, emerging AI technologies, and evaluation results to refine existing solutions and identify opportunities to improve productivity, reliability, and business value.
• Participate in special projects and perform other duties as assigned to advance the firm’s AI engineering capabilities and business priorities.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (advanced degree preferred).
• 5 years of hands-on software engineering experience delivering multiple production-quality applications or products from concept through deployment.
• Experience deploying at least one LLM-powered feature or application to real users, regardless of scale.
• Experience working directly with domain experts, business stakeholders, or customers to translate requirements into technical solutions and own delivered outcomes.
• Strong full-stack background, including backend services, data models, APIs, and modern user-facing applications.
• Deep proficiency in at least one mainstream programming language such as Python, TypeScript, Go, or Java, with production-quality development practices and understanding of design patterns.
• Ability to learn and apply new languages, frameworks, and technologies quickly, with Python and TypeScript familiarity preferred.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, architecture, automated testing, debugging, performance optimization, and building scalable, maintainable systems.
• Experience developing and integrating modern web applications, APIs, authentication mechanisms, and secure enterprise services.
• Proven ability to validate solutions with measurable outcomes using automated testing, benchmarks, experiments, evaluation frameworks, or A/B testing.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with capability to evaluate trade-offs and address ambiguity.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to nontechnical stakeholders and subject matter experts.
• Familiarity with LLM applications, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AI evaluation methodologies, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) (preferred).
• Experience with agentic AI concepts such as orchestration, tool use, context management, and human-in-the-loop workflows (preferred; prior agent-building not required).
• Cloud and application development experience including Microsoft Azure, containers, PostgreSQL, and React (preferred).
• Experience in professional services, regulated industries, or environments serving highly specialized business users (preferred; Tax/Assurance/Accounting experience not required).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including documentation of technical solutions and design decisions.
• Ability to work independently, manage competing priorities, adapt quickly to evolving requirements, and deliver quality solutions in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience using AI-assisted and agentic development tools to improve engineering productivity, or willingness to incorporate them into daily development.
• No professional certifications or licenses required.

Technologies

• Python, TypeScript, Go, Java
• LLM-powered features, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• Microsoft Azure, containers, PostgreSQL, React
• A/B testing

Compensation

• National: $205,000–$250,000 per year
• California: $205,000–$250,000 per year

Benefits

Baker Tilly offers a comprehensive compensation and benefits package to eligible employees.