Forward Deployed Engineer - Agents

Agents are only as good as the team behind them. We're experienced researchers and engineers building vertical AI agents that run in production inside some of the most demanding environments there are: health insurers, banks, and the public sector, where decisions are audited and mistakes carry real consequences.

We're looking for a forward-deployed engineer to embed with our customers in regulated industries, health insurers, banks, and the public sector, and turn their hardest operational bottlenecks into AI agents that actually run in production. This role is less about being a rockstar coder and more about being exceptional at understanding systems, using AI agents to move fast, and explaining the work clearly to everyone from client engineers to product and business stakeholders.

What you'll do

• Embed with customers. Work directly with operations teams and domain experts at health insurers, banks, and public institutions to understand their real workflows, then identify where an agent genuinely pays off, and where it doesn't.

• Scope and run workshops. Lead the buy-vs-build conversation per use case: is there a real backlog, is the process stable, can "correctly processed" be defined, is there an owner in Operations to drive rollout.

• Build production agents with AI. Take a use case from prototype to a deployed, audited agent, leaning heavily on agentic coding tools to move quickly: handling messy real-world inputs (PDFs, scans, voice), encoding complex domain rules, and integrating with the customer's systems.

• Translate between worlds. Explain the same system two ways: a technical view for the client's engineers and a clear, outcome-focused view for their product and business teams. Often in German.

• Ship through our products. Use elluminate to evaluate agents with evidence before go-live, ellarun to deploy them securely with full audit trails, and ellaverse to validate them against realistic, domain-specific scenarios.

• Close the loop. Bring what you learn in the field back to the product and research teams, so each engagement makes the next one faster.

What we're looking for

Must-haves

• A builder's mentality , whatever your background. We don't care what you studied. CS, business, physics, biology, economics, something else entirely, or nothing at all. What matters is that you're a builder: smart, driven, hungry, and happiest when you're shipping something real. If you have that mentality and you're great with AI agents, the rest is learnable.

• Willingness to work side-by-side with clients , on-site in Germany and across Europe. These embeds are time-boxed rather than permanent, but during an engagement you should expect to be physically with the customer where the work demands it.

• You're excellent at understanding unfamiliar systems quickly , reading a codebase or environment and figuring out what it does, why, and where the risks are, even if you didn't write it and wouldn't have written it that way.

• You're fluent with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar) and use them as your default way of working. You don't need to be a rockstar coder; you need to be excellent at directing agents to build, debug, and ship.

• You're a strong communicator who can explain the same system to two very different audiences: deep and technical for engineers, clear and outcome-focused for product and business stakeholders.

• Comfort working directly with customers: scoping problems, managing expectations, and translating between domain experts and engineering.

• Enthusiasm about AI and its applications. In software development and beyond.

• On-site collaboration ≥3 days/week in Berlin or Bremen. Travel to our Bremen HQ during onboarding.

• Fluent, professional German . You'll run workshops, present to client engineers and business stakeholders, and write client-facing material in German.

• Fluency in English.

• Valid EU work authorization.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in regulated industries (insurance, banking, public sector) or other domains with heavy compliance and audit requirements.

• Hands-on experience with LLMs, agent frameworks, agent evaluation, RL environments.

• Experience taking AI from prototype to production, not just demos.

• Open-source contributions or public writing on agents and applied AI/FDE.

What matters most

We prioritize demonstrated excellence in your projects and career . If you’re motivated to build and optimize AI solutions, we want to hear from you, even if you don’t meet every single criterion.

Why us?

• Shape the future of AI development: You'll have real influence over our products and technical direction, helping decide how AI agents get built, evaluated, and deployed in the environments where it's hardest to get right.

• Always at the frontier: You'll work with the newest models and techniques the moment they land, on the problems that make agents actually function in production: orchestrating multi-step workflows, integrating and switching across LLMs, building robust evaluation and guardrails, handling messy real-world inputs (PDFs, scans, voice), and engineering for auditability and reliability under regulatory constraints. Modern, well-architected systems, no legacy baggage holding you back.

• Career-defining opportunity: AI agents are about to reshape how entire regulated industries operate, and getting them out of the demo and into real operations is the hardest, most valuable problem in the field right now. Almost no one has done it inside environments like health insurers, banks, and public institutions. You'll be one of the people who builds them first, and walk away with expertise and a track record that very few engineers in the world can claim.

• Ownership and impact: Get full end-to-end ownership of the agents you build, direct collaboration with AI researchers and engineers, and immediate feedback on how your work helps customers ship reliable AI. Your engineering decisions directly shape agents that make real, audited decisions in production.

• Competitive package with upside: In addition to a competitive salary, we offer a VSOP (Virtual Stock Option Program) to give you a stake in the company’s success as we grow.

• Best-in-class development experience: Generous, no-friction access to all the AI tools and platforms that make your day-to-day faster, so you spend your time on hard problems, not on overhead.

• Work environment: Our Bremen office features stunning waterfront views, complimentary beverages, smoothies, and a boat. We also have an office in Berlin, giving you flexibility across both locations.

• Grow with transformative technology: Build deep expertise in AI agents, evaluation and infrastructure alongside our expanding team, mastering the technologies that are reshaping entire industries.

About ellamind

We build the tools enterprises need to trust, deploy, and scale AI agents. elluminate evaluates LLMs and agents with evidence instead of guesswork; ellarun deploys them securely in hours, not months; and the ellaverse provides realistic, domain-specific, rigorously validated environments to put agents through their paces before they ever reach a customer. We like owning problems end-to-end, shipping pragmatically, and giving back to the open-source community. We're cash-flow positive, with offices in Bremen (HQ) and Berlin.