SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 160,000 - 220,000 / annual
Via Transportation is launching AI Labs, an incubator-style team operating as a startup within the company, to expand beyond transit into AI-powered solutions for cities. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll be a founding member of this new team with rare autonomy and direct access to leadership.
You'll own the full lifecycle of AI product development—from problem framing and data pipeline design through production deployment and iteration in live environments. Working in a forward-deployed manner, you'll collaborate closely with city partners to understand their constraints and rapidly iterate on scalable agentic solutions. You'll lead technical scoping workshops with city leaders, translating complex local problems into AI-driven workflows.
Your technical scope spans the full stack: designing and building production-grade backend and frontend systems that power AI features, managing data flows, designing scalable APIs, and ensuring reliable performance at scale. You'll contribute to intelligent tooling involving data consolidation, predictive modeling, real-time decision-making, and LLM-powered experiences. You'll work across a fast-moving roadmap collaborating with product, data science, and operations teams to identify high-impact AI opportunities.
Beyond execution, you'll help shape AI Labs' technical culture from the ground up—contributing to how the team builds, reviews, ships, and iterates. You'll stay close to the frontier of AI development and proactively bring new ideas, tools, and approaches to the team.
You bring 5+ years of hands-on full-stack application development with a track record of owning features end-to-end. You have 3+ years working with AI tools and building AI-powered products, with deep expertise across the AI stack including LLMs, predictive modeling, and supporting data infrastructure. At your core, you're a strong backend engineer comfortable with distributed systems, scalable API design, and writing clean, maintainable code. You thrive in ambiguity and early-stage environments, taking ownership without being asked. You communicate effectively cross-functionally, bring intellectual curiosity, and are energized by working directly with users and customers—including willingness to travel for on-site collaboration.
