Role overview

TribalScale is seeking a Forward Deployed Agile Software Engineer to embed with clients and internal teams, solving complex business problems through rapid software design and deployment. This role sits at the intersection of software engineering, artificial intelligence, and product delivery, requiring someone who can translate ambiguous business challenges into working solutions while serving as a trusted technical partner to clients.

Key responsibilities

Work directly with clients to understand their business objectives, operational workflows, technical environments, data sources, and constraints.
Convert business challenges into clear technical requirements, solution architectures, prototypes, and detailed delivery plans.
Design and build AI-enabled applications, agentic workflows, developer tools, APIs, data pipelines, and full-stack products.
Engineer the systems surrounding AI models, including prompt design, tool integration, context management, permissions, runtime controls, observability, and feedback loops.
Build and refine agent loops that handle planning, tool selection, execution, observation, reflection, recovery, and termination logic.
Create evaluation frameworks that assess task completion, accuracy, reliability, safety, latency, cost, and user value across AI systems.
Develop rapid prototypes and proofs of concept, validate them with users and representative evaluations, then evolve successful ideas into secure, scalable products.
Integrate solutions with client systems, enterprise data sources, cloud platforms, and third-party services.
Implement safeguards, permission boundaries, approval steps, and fallback mechanisms for autonomous and semi-autonomous systems.
Instrument AI applications to enable teams to inspect execution traces, understand intermediate states, diagnose failures, and improve performance.
Identify and address failure modes including hallucinations, looping behavior, brittle tool calls, context loss, prompt injection, non-deterministic behavior, and unsafe actions.
Communicate technical decisions, risks, trade-offs, and progress clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Collaborate with product managers, designers, engineers, data specialists, security teams, and client stakeholders throughout delivery cycles.
Establish strong engineering practices including automated testing, documentation, observability, security, and continuous delivery.

Requirements

Professional experience building and deploying production-grade software, ideally including AI-powered or agentic systems.
Strong proficiency in Python, TypeScript, or another language commonly used to build AI applications, platforms, and developer tooling.
Practical understanding of harness engineering, including design of infrastructure, context, tools, permissions, controls, and feedback mechanisms for reliable AI agent operation.
Experience building or working with agent loops, including planning, tool selection, execution, observation, reflection, recovery, and termination.
Familiarity with graph-based orchestration, state machines, and multi-step workflows for coordinating agents, tools, data, and human approvals.
Experience designing evaluation systems for AI applications, including task-based benchmarks, regression suites, model-graded evaluations, and human review processes.

What makes this role worth considering

This position offers the opportunity to work across a diverse technology stack—from user interfaces and backend services to AI infrastructure and deployment pipelines—while making immediate, measurable impact on real-world client challenges. You’ll operate as both a hands-on engineer and trusted advisor, directly shaping how organizations adapt and transform through digital innovation and artificial intelligence.