Lead OpenAI Forward Deployed Engineer - GPS
Data and Analytics | AI and Data Architecture and Solution Design
Same job available in 8 locations
Arlington/Rosslyn, Virginia, United States
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Austin, Texas, United States
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
New York, New York, United States
Sacramento, California, United States
San Diego, California, United States
Position Summary
Our Deloitte AI & Engineering team works to transform technology platforms, drive innovation, and help make a significant impact on our clients’ success. You’ll work alongside talented professionals reimagining and reengineering operations and processes that are critical to businesses. Your contributions can help clients improve financial performance, accelerate new digital ventures, and fuel growth through innovation.
Work you’ll do
As a Lead OpenAI FDE, you will serve as the senior practitioner-leader embedded directly with our most strategic clients, leading forward-deployed engineering pods that develop and deploy GenAI solutions into production for Deloitte’s most strategic clients. You’ll set technical direction, remove delivery blockers, and stay hands-on; designing, reviewing, and debugging systems with the team. You’ll translate engineering trade-offs into clear decisions for client leaders when needed. Your ability to influence decisions at the C-suite level, while maintaining hands-on technical credibility, is what sets you apart. Pods under your leadership may be deployed onshore with clients or in hybrid onshore/offshore configurations, leveraging Deloitte's global delivery capability to maximize speed and scale.
Client Engagement
- Serve as the senior client-facing presence, building trusted advisor relationships as the senior engineering partner for client product, data, and platform leaders
- Lead executive-level discovery, define success metrics (quality, latency, cost, adoption, risk) and a phased plan from prototype to production and scaling
- Navigate organizational complexity and influence to align executive sponsors, IT leadership, and business owners around a shared vision
- Represent Deloitte's FDE capability in client pursuits, executive briefings, and platform partner engagements—contributing to pipeline development and deal shaping.
Cross-Functional Pod Leadership & Program Governance
- Lead FDE pods of 2–5 onshore anchored and offshore supported engineers, owning execution, resource management, escalations and overall delivery health
- Enforce delivery standards across the pod: sprint cadences, stakeholder communication plans, risk management, and quality gates
- Coordinate multi-pod or multi-workstream engagements, ensuring reliable architecture and consistent client experience.
- Mentor and develop junior FDEs
GenAI Solution Development
- Architect and oversee delivery of LLM-enabled applications including copilots, agentic workflows, assistants, and knowledge search experiences using one or more enterprise AI platforms (see Platform Requirements below)
- Set direction for prompt engineering, tool-use patterns, and human-in-the-loop controls
- Govern end-to-end RAG pipeline design—including ingestion, chunking, embedding, vector retrieval, and hybrid search—ensuring production-grade quality and scalability.
- Define evaluation frameworks covering quality, hallucination risk, safety, latency, cost, and governance; ensure the pod meets agreed engineering quality bars to these standards.
Engineering & Data Foundations
- Review and contribute to production-quality code
- Guide architecture of data pipelines powering GenAI use cases
- Enforce strong data management, testing, CI/CD, logging, versioning, and documentation practices
- Deep familiarity with cloud environments (AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud)
The Team
Deloitte’s Government & Public Services (GPS) practice – our people, ideas, technology and outcomes – is designed for impact. Serving federal, state, & local government clients as well as public higher education institutions, our team of professionals brings fresh perspective to help clients anticipate disruption, reimagine the possible, and fulfill their mission promise.
Our AI & Data offering provides a full spectrum of solutions for designing, developing, and operating cutting-edge Data and AI platforms, products, insights, and services. Our offerings help clients innovate, enhance and operate their data, AI, and analytics capabilities, ensuring they can mature and scale effectively with organizational intelligence programs and differentiated strategies to win in their chosen markets.
Qualifications
Required:
- Bachelor's degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Data Science or Engineering.
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, data science, or analytics engineering.
- 1+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying GenAI/LLM-powered solutions in client or production environments
- 1+ years of experience with OpenAI including hands on experience with one of the following key platform technologies; GPT-4o, Assistants API, Responses API, OpenAI Agents SDK
- 1+ years of experience leading project workstreams/engagements and translating business problems into AI solutions
- 1+ years of experience building reliable, maintainable, and well-documented code
- Ability to travel 50%, on average, based on the work you do and the clients and industries/sectors you serve
- Must be legally authorized to work in the United States without the need for employer sponsorship, now or at any time in the future
- Ability to obtain and maintain a US government security clearance
Preferred:
- Experience with cloud environments (AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud) and common platform services (storage, compute, IAM, networking)
- Demonstrated ability to work directly alongside client technical teams and program stakeholders in fast-paced, ambiguous delivery environments
- Data engineering experience with Spark, Airflow/dbt, streaming, data modeling or ML/data science background feature engineering, experimentation or model evaluation
- Experience with MLOps/LLMOps practices: evaluation frameworks, model monitoring, and prompt management
- Experience integrating LLM solutions with enterprise systems via APIs, microservices, or event-driven architectures
- Experience operating within hybrid onshore/offshore teams
- Familiarity with security, privacy, and compliance considerations
Deloitte is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. If you require a reasonable accommodation to participate in the recruiting process, please direct your inquiries to the Global Call Center (GCC) at USTalentCICInbox@deloitte.com.
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**Benefits**
At Deloitte, we know that great people make a great organization. We value our people and offer employees a broad range of benefits. Learn more about what working at Deloitte can mean for you.
**Our people and culture**
Our inclusive culture empowers our people to be who they are, contribute their unique perspectives, and make a difference individually and collectively. It enables us to leverage different ways of thinking, ideas, and perspectives, and bring more creativity and innovation to help solve our clients' most complex challenges. This makes Deloitte one of the most rewarding places to work.
Our purpose
Deloitte’s purpose is to make an impact that matters for our people, clients, and communities. At Deloitte, purpose is synonymous with how we work every day. It defines who we are. Our purpose comes through in our work with clients that enables impact and value in their organizations, as well as through our own investments, commitments, and actions across areas that help drive positive outcomes for our communities. Learn more.
**Professional development**
From entry-level employees to senior leaders, we believe there’s always room to learn. We offer opportunities to build new skills, take on leadership opportunities and connect and grow through mentorship. From on-the-job learning experiences to formal development programs, our professionals have a variety of opportunities to continue to grow throughout their career.
As used in this posting, "Deloitte" means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see [https://www.deloitte.com/us/about](https://www.deloitte.com/us/about) for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries.
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability or protected veteran status, or any other legally protected basis, in accordance with applicable law.
Requisition code: 329305
Job ID 329305