Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) role is half engineer, half customer co-creator: embedded into a client team, turning ambiguous business problems into production-grade AI and data products. You will be on customer floors — in factories, retail back-offices, contact centres, boardrooms — diagnosing real business problems in Cantonese, designing AI solutions in English, and shipping production-grade code. You will act as a business translator: hearing what a factory supervisor really means in Cantonese, seeing where the bottleneck actually sits in the workflow, and personally shipping the solution that moves the KPI.

Key responsibilities

• Embed with customer teams across the Greater Bay Area for 2–4 weeks at a time, mapping end-to-end processes (Order-to-Cash, Procure-to-Pay, customer service, production scheduling, claims handling)
• Run Cantonese-language interviews with frontline staff — store managers, factory supervisors, customer service leads — to surface time-consuming, error-prone, people-dependent steps
• Translate customer pain into a ranked AI opportunity backlog with feasibility, effort and ROI for each item
• Write clear English documentation for customer HQ, overseas tech partners, and internal stakeholders
• Design the AI approach for each bottleneck: Agent workflows, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), document automation, predictive models, or workflow orchestration
• Pick the right tech path — build vs fine-tune vs prompt vs buy — and justify the trade-offs
• Write production-grade Python or TypeScript — not notebook demos
• Build RAG pipelines, Agent orchestrations, data pipelines and front-ends end-to-end
• Handle private cloud, hybrid deployment, data sovereignty, and audit controls
• Define KPIs with the customer and prove the value in numbers

About you

• Native or near-native Cantonese plus business-fluent English (written and verbal)
• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong Python or TypeScript; comfortable shipping production code
• Hands-on experience with LLM applications: Agent frameworks, RAG, prompt engineering, evaluation
• Solid SQL and data-engineering fundamentals (ETL, pipelines, warehousing)
• Cloud platform experience (AWS / Azure / GCP, at least one)
• Track record of owning outcomes end-to-end, not just your module
• Comfortable presenting to C-suite and coding in the same week
• Structured problem solver in ambiguous environments with bias for action
• Builder mentality: you act like a startup CTO, not a ticket-taker

Benefits

• Performance bonus tied to project outcomes
• Equity / stock options — meaningful upside for high performers
• MPF, medical & dental insurance
• Work visa sponsorship available for strong overseas candidates
• Direct exposure to frontier AI tech: LLMs, Agent frameworks, RAG engines, workflow platforms
• Cross-border projects across Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Southeast Asia
• Flat org — work with founders, no 10-layer hierarchy
• Annual learning budget for training, conferences, tools

About us

Moon Lab Limited is bringing AI to the front line of business, from Hong Kong. Understand us more from our official website: https://ai.themoonlab.co/