Forward Deployed Engineer (Applied AI) – Europe

Your role As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will work closely with our clients to turn complex business challenges into production-ready AI solutions.

Location: Germany, with regular presence at client sites in Germany and occasionally elsewhere in Europe

You will take ownership of an applied-AI workstream from end to end: identifying a use case with measurable business value, designing and building AI agents connected to the client’s systems and data, deploying the solution in the client’s environment, and enabling the client’s team to operate it independently.

This is a senior, hands-on engineering role combining:

• Production-grade software engineering
• Applied LLM and agent engineering
• Evaluation and observability
• Client-facing consulting and stakeholder communication

You will work as part of a small delivery team, collaborating with a Delivery Manager and senior technical specialists from our international Applied AI unit.

Your Responsibilities Discover and define valuable use cases

• Lead data-driven discovery together with the client
• Understand operational processes and establish a measurable baseline
• Define the target metric and clear acceptance criteria before development begins
• Assess whether an AI agent is the right solution or whether a simpler deterministic approach would be more effective
• Translate business requirements into a technically achievable workstream

Design and build AI agents

• Architect AI agents, including their purpose, scope, decision-making authority, human escalation points, and division of responsibilities
• Create executable specifications and evaluation sets that govern development and releases
• Build and verify solutions using modern coding agents and development tools
• Integrate agents with real enterprise systems through MCP servers and APIs
• Connect to environments such as ticketing systems, ERPs, CRMs, legacy databases, and data pipelines
• Establish automated evaluations and quality gates in CI/CD workflows

Deploy and operate production systems

• Deploy solutions within the client’s cloud, network, security, and compliance environment
• Implement tracing, monitoring, alerting, and cost measurement
• Monitor latency, quality, drift, and cost per transaction
• Apply security principles such as least-privilege access, sandboxing, prompt-injection protection, and auditability
• Support technical reviews relating to security, data protection, and production readiness

Enable a sustainable handover

• Create clear architecture documentation, runbooks, evaluation suites, and incident playbooks
• Train the client’s technical and operational teams
• Document known limitations and operational responsibilities
• Ensure that the solution can be operated independently by the client
• Complete the handover against clear, objective readiness criteria

Communicate with stakeholders

• Provide transparent progress reporting in situations with incomplete or changing information
• Clearly distinguish between confirmed information, assumptions, risks, and dependencies
• Translate technical decisions into business consequences
• Communicate challenges early and accompany them with practical options and recommendations

How We Work

• Metric first: Every workstream begins with a measurable baseline and a business-relevant target.
• Production over prototypes: We build operational systems, not isolated proofs of concept.
• Handover by design: Solutions are documented and designed so that the client’s team can own and operate them.
• Technology-agnostic thinking: We select the appropriate model, framework, and architecture for the problem rather than forcing every use case into one stack.
• Close client collaboration: Discovery, delivery, communication, and capability transfer are integral parts of the engineering work.

Your profile Essential Experience

• At least five years of software-engineering experience, including responsibility for systems running in production

• Strong backend and integration experience, with enough frontend knowledge to deliver a complete solution

• Strong Python skills and experience with an additional technology stack, preferably TypeScript or Java

• Practical experience using LLMs through APIs in a real application

• Experience with prompting, structured output, function or tool calling, and at least one agent framework

• Demonstrable experience with systematic evaluation, such as:

• Error analysis using real data

• Failure taxonomies

• Evaluation datasets

• Automated quality gates for releases

• Working knowledge of machine-learning and deep-learning fundamentals, including transformers, tokenization, context windows, post-training, and common failure modes

• Experience with SQL, data pipelines, ETL processes, containers, and at least one major cloud platform

• Customer-facing, consulting, or technical-founder experience

• Experience taking responsibility for a technical or business outcome in front of a client or senior stakeholder

• Ability to work independently in ambiguous environments and resolve blockers proactively

• Clear communication under pressure

• Excellent German and English skills at C1–C2 level: You communicate confidently in German with clients and stakeholders, while English is the primary language for technical documentation and collaboration with our international Applied AI team.

Nice to have

• Experience operating agent-based or RAG systems in production, including monitoring, evaluation, and cost management
• Experience building or consuming MCP servers
• Experience designing tools that can be reliably used by language models
• Enterprise integration experience involving legacy ERP, CRM, ITSM, or ticketing systems
• Knowledge of experimentation methods such as A/B testing and guardrail metrics
• Experience supporting security or data-protection reviews for AI systems
• Familiarity with the EU AI Act or ISO/IEC 42001
• Experience in regulated or industrial environments such as automotive, manufacturing, financial services, or telematics
• Experience teaching, mentoring, or enabling other engineers

What This Role Is Not

• It is not a prompt-engineering or AI-tool-adoption role
• It is not a research or model-training position
• It is not a platform role without direct client interaction
• It is not a project-management or people-management position
• It is not a consulting role focused primarily on presentations or concepts
• It is a hands-on engineering role with responsibility for delivering measurable production outcomes

What You Can Expect

• Ownership of technically challenging applied-AI workstreams
• Direct collaboration with clients and senior stakeholders
• Close cooperation with an international Applied AI team
• The opportunity to build AI systems that move beyond prototypes and deliver measurable operational value
• A working environment that values engineering quality, transparency, pragmatic decision-making, and sustainable knowledge transfer

Über uns Warum ACT Digital? Wir bieten dir:

• 30 Tage Urlaub pro Jahr (für eine 5-Tage Arbeitswoche)
• Flexible Arbeitszeiten und Home-Office Möglichkeit
• Aktive Karriereplanung inkl. kontinuierlicher Weiterbildungen
• Große Auswahl an Benefits wie z.B. ein Jobrad-Leasing, Wellpass, FINN JobAuto, hrmony Benefits uvm.
• Individuelle Gehaltsbestandteile wie z.B. Zuschuss zur Mobilität (Deutschlandticket) und Essenszuschüsse
• Attraktive Bezuschussung zur Betrieblichen Altersvorsorge
• Social Events (vor Ort + Online)

Wir freuen uns darauf, von dir zu hören! ✨

act digital ist seit 2011 Partner für digitale Transformation und IT-Sicherheit. Unser Anspruch: Technologie sicher, resilient und zukunftsfähig machen. Dafür verbinden wir strategische Beratung, Security Engineering und Cloud-Expertise mit der Stärke unserer Nearshore-Teams in Portugal, Polen und Brasilien. So liefern wir deutsche Qualität kombiniert mit internationaler Skalierbarkeit .

Unsere Schwerpunkte:

• Cyber- & OT-Security: Penetrationstests für Software, Hardware und Cloud, Produktsicherheitsanalysen, Security by Design, Bedrohungs- & Schwachstellenanalysen in IT- und OT-Umgebungen
• Cloud & Digitalisierung: Sichere Cloud-Architekturen, Modernisierung bestehender Systeme, Migration & Betrieb
• Security Engineering: Entwicklung und Integration sicherer Systeme, moderne Kryptografie inkl. Post-Quantum-Verfahren
• Compliance & Standards: Beratung und Umsetzung von NIS2, ISO 27001, TISAX, ISO 21434 (Automotive) und IEC 62443 (OT Security)
• Nearshoring: Skalierbare Projektteams aus unseren internationalen Delivery Centern – effizient, agil und hochqualitativ

Mit tiefem technologischem Know-how, internationaler Erfahrung und einer klaren No-Bullshit-Mentalität begleiten wir unsere Kunden dabei, Sicherheit, Resilienz und Innovationskraft nachhaltig zu stärken .