Role overview

TribalScale is seeking a Forward Deployed Agile Software Engineer to work at the intersection of software engineering, artificial intelligence, and product development. As a digital innovation firm, TribalScale partners with clients to build transformative digital products and apply emerging technologies to solve meaningful business challenges. In this role, you will embed with client teams to understand complex problems, design solutions, and deploy production-quality software in real-world environments.

Key responsibilities

Work directly with clients to understand their objectives, workflows, technical environments, data constraints, and operational needs.
Translate ambiguous business challenges into clear technical requirements, solution architectures, prototypes, and 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 prompts, tools, context management, memory, permissions, runtime controls, observability, and feedback mechanisms.
Build and refine agent loops that support planning, tool selection, execution, observation, reflection, recovery, and termination.
Create evaluation frameworks that measure task completion, accuracy, reliability, safety, latency, cost, and user value.
Develop rapid prototypes and proofs of concept, validate them with real users, and 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 fallbacks for autonomous and semi-autonomous systems.
Instrument AI applications so teams can inspect traces, understand intermediate states, diagnose failures, and improve performance.
Identify and address failure modes such as hallucinations, looping, brittle tool calls, context loss, prompt injection, and unsafe actions.
Communicate technical decisions, risks, trade-offs, and progress clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Collaborate with product managers, designers, engineers, data specialists, security teams, and client stakeholders throughout delivery.
Establish strong engineering practices including automated testing, documentation, observability, security, and continuous delivery.
Capture reusable patterns, components, and insights that strengthen TribalScale’s engineering capabilities for future engagements.

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 designing infrastructure, context, tools, permissions, controls, and feedback mechanisms for AI agents.
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.

What makes this role worth considering

This position offers the opportunity to work at the cutting edge of AI application development, embedding directly with clients to see your work create immediate, measurable impact. You will operate as both a hands-on engineer and a trusted technical partner, moving comfortably between discovery and delivery while helping clients make sound technology decisions. The role is based remotely in Canada and allows you to work across the full technology stack on transformative projects that apply emerging technologies to meaningful business challenges.