Forward-Deployed Engineer

Job title: Forward-Deployed Engineer

About the Role Forward-Deployed Engineer to join our Professional Services team. This role embeds with our most strategic enterprise customers to drive frontend modernization, platform migrations, and AI adoption. You will lead migrations, architect high-performance applications, and build production AI solutions within customer environments.

What You'll Do

• Lead complex frontend migrations—modernizing legacy React, Vue, or other frameworks to Next.js, including Pages to App Router transitions, incremental adoption strategies, and large-scale codebase transformations.
• Conduct technical assessments and code audits, analyzing customer codebases for performance bottlenecks, architectural anti-patterns, and optimization opportunities—delivering actionable roadmaps that drive measurable improvements.
• Architect and implement high-performance Next.js applications, leveraging App Router, Server Components, streaming, ISR, edge functions, and advanced rendering strategies to meet enterprise scale and performance requirements.
• Optimize Core Web Vitals and application performance, using tools like Vercel Speed Insights to diagnose issues and implement fixes that improve SEO, conversion rates, and user experience.
• Build production AI solutions using Vercel's AI SDK and AI Cloud—including conversational interfaces, production agents, MCP servers, and agentic workflows that transform customer operations.
• Embed with strategic customers to build production applications—shipping TypeScript code that goes live.
• Drive enablement and knowledge transfer through workshops, pair programming, and documentation—ensuring customer teams can extend and maintain solutions independently.
• Navigate complex enterprise environments by building relationships with stakeholders across engineering, product, and executive teams—translating technical capabilities into business outcomes.
• Participate in pre-sales activities by providing technical expertise during discovery calls, scoping sessions, and proposal development for migrations, audits, and AI transformation engagements.
• Contribute to our service evolution by identifying repeatable patterns, building reusable components, and sharing implementation insights back to Product and Engineering teams.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering with at least 2 years in a customer-facing technical role (consulting, solutions engineering, forward deployed engineering, or technical founder experience).
• Expert-level TypeScript skills—this is your primary language. You write production TypeScript daily and have strong opinions on type safety, patterns, and tooling.
• Deep expertise in Next.js, with a proven track record of architecting and delivering complex applications using App Router, Server Components, SSR, SSG, ISR, and edge functions.
• Demonstrated experience leading frontend migrations—you've modernized legacy applications to Next.js, navigated incremental adoption strategies, and understand the challenges of migrating large codebases in production environments.
• Mastery of React and its ecosystem, including advanced state management, performance optimization, and modern patterns like streaming, suspense, and concurrent features.
• Production experience with LLMs and AI applications, including prompt engineering, agent development, and tool use patterns. Familiarity with Vercel's AI SDK is strongly preferred.
• High agency with comfort in ambiguity—you thrive when given a problem to solve rather than a task to complete, and you can navigate complex organizations to drive outcomes.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to conduct technical discovery, present to executives, mentor engineers, and build lasting customer relationships—all with a low-ego, collaborative approach.
• Business acumen to understand customer objectives, translate technical capabilities into ROI, and identify expansion opportunities throughout engagement lifecycles.
• Willingness to travel 25-40% to customer sites for embedded work and relationship building.