Forward Deployed AI Engineer
Technical Staff
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NYC
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$160K – $195K
About Lunon
Lunon is building the next frontier of consulting: institutional-grade strategy with forward-deployed engineering, turning ambitious companies into AI-native leaders. Our engineers embed inside the business and ship production AI systems the team relies on every day, and our strategists make sure that work moves the numbers that matter.
We are a small team headquartered in New York City and backed by General Catalyst, working with private equity firms, their portfolio companies, and mid-market and enterprise operators. Most of our roles are remote, open to anyone in the US. We favor evidence over opinion, move fast, and own what we ship end to end.
About the role
You own the model side of an engagement: choose the right model, adapt it to the client’s data, prove it works, and make it fast and cheap enough to run every day. You work beside a Forward Deployed Data Engineer who owns the data. First up: helping an ERP company make its product AI-native.
The team is young and moves fast. Everyone here has a wide skill set, works with the newest tools as they land, and owns what they ship end to end. Nobody hands you a ticket.
What you’ll do
Pick the right model for each job, from frontier APIs to open-weight models, and know when fine-tuning beats a better prompt.
Fine-tune when it pays off: supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and parameter-efficient methods like LoRA.
Build the evaluation harnesses and benchmarks that tell us whether a change made things better.
Take models from training to serving, and tune inference cost, latency, and quality.
Sit with the client’s team, find where AI moves their numbers, and say no to work that won’t pay back.
What you’ll need
Experience matters here. We judge it by what you’ve shipped and kept running, not by a number of years.
You’ve fine-tuned or post-trained a model and can explain what worked and what didn’t.
You’ve built evals that changed a decision.
You’ve shipped LLM features that real users depend on.
You’ve served a model in production and cared about its cost and latency.
You use AI coding tools every day and judge the result by the system and its output, not the language.
Nice to have
Apply even if none of these are true.
You’ve built on or integrated with an ERP, CRM, or accounting system.
You’ve shipped extraction or search over messy business documents.
You’ve done consulting, agency, or forward-deployed work and know how to be useful in someone else’s building on day two.
How we hire
A 30-minute conversation with the team about what you’ve shipped and what we’re building.
A technical deep-dive on one system you owned, from the business problem to production.
A working session on a real client problem with the team.
References, then an offer. We aim to finish in two weeks.
Location
Fully remote, US-based. Lunon is headquartered in New York City.
Compensation
Base salary of $160,000 to $195,000.
Beware of recruitment fraud. All official correspondence comes from a lunon.ai email address. We will never ask you to share bank account information, cash a check, or purchase equipment as part of the hiring process.
Questions about the role? careers@lunon.ai