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Napster is building embodied, multimodal AI agents designed to work alongside people in enterprise environments. As a Forward Deployed Engineer in Professional Services, you will embed directly with strategic customers to transform AI from proof-of-concept into production reality.
You will design, build, and ship AI agents and digital experiences that solve real business problems—from digital twins greeting shoppers to multilingual agents in public-sector kiosks to specialist agent crews supporting employees within enterprise systems. Working closely with Solution Engineering, Enablement, Product, and Engineering teams, you'll combine strong engineering skills, deep understanding of multimodal and agentic AI, and customer-facing judgment to deliver solutions meeting high standards for quality, reliability, and responsible use.
Key responsibilities include:
- Build production-grade AI agents and digital twins on the Napster platform, ensuring they meet customer requirements for accuracy, latency, brand, and experience quality.
- Build and ship technical artifacts for production workflows: MCP servers, agent skills, sub-agents, tool integrations, knowledge and memory layers, and custom front-end experiences.
- Use agentic development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) to rapidly prototype, iterate with customers in real-time, and move from proof-of-concept to production quickly.
- Design multi-agent architectures and orchestration patterns, selecting appropriate models, tools, and frameworks for each use case.
- Scope integrations and translate customer needs into clear technical plans, timelines, and success criteria alongside Solution Engineering.
- Provide white-glove deployment support across web, mobile, and physical installations, coordinating with remote and on-site teams.
- Design and run evaluation pipelines for agent behavior, tool use, persona fidelity, conversation quality, and safety guardrails.
- Codify repeatable deployment patterns into reusable skills, templates, plugins, and reference architectures; feed insights back to Product and Engineering.
- Contribute to internal programs including agent dogfooding and enablement to help the wider team adopt AI-native ways of working.
- Stay current on the rapidly evolving AI stack: frontier LLMs, real-time voice and video models, agent SDKs, protocols like MCP and A2A, and observability tooling.
- Build long-term customer relationships and proactively identify new AI deployment opportunities.
- Travel to customer sites for on-site builds and launches, estimated at 25% depending on location.
- Champion Napster's mission and responsible AI practices in the field.
You operate autonomously, thrive in ambiguity, and represent Napster at the highest level in customer environments, including on-site installations and executive-level engagements.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of experience in a technical, customer-facing role such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, or Software Engineer with consulting or professional services experience. Former technical founders encouraged to apply.
- Hands-on, daily experience with agentic coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex, with a clear point of view on how to use them effectively on real production codebases.
- Production experience building with LLMs, including prompt and context engineering, tool use and function calling, agent development, retrieval and memory design, and evaluation frameworks.
- Experience building MCP servers, agent skills, or similar extensibility layers that give agents access to real systems and data.
- Working knowledge of modern agent frameworks and SDKs (Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK, LangGraph, Vercel AI SDK) and judgment on when not to use a framework.
- Strong programming skills in Python and/or TypeScript, with a track record of shipping production applications and integrating with third-party APIs.
- High agency and comfort navigating ambiguity in complex organizations and fast-moving product environments.
- Cooperative mindset for cross-functional collaboration, balancing competing priorities with integrity.
- Strong communication skills to run discovery with customers and explain technical concepts to diverse stakeholders (developers to C-suite) with low ego and collaborative approach.
- Genuine enthusiasm for building AI experiences that people actually want to interact with.
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience with real-time voice, video, or multimodal AI systems (WebRTC, streaming audio/video, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, avatars).
- Experience with LLM observability and eval tooling (Langfuse, Braintrust, LangSmith, Arize).
- Experience running multiple coding agents in parallel or building internal workflows, plugins, or skill libraries for other engineers.
- Background in retail, government and public sector, education, healthcare, or other enterprise verticals.
- Experience deploying solutions in physical environments (kiosks, venues, retail spaces).
- Familiarity with enterprise IT, security reviews, and integration patterns (SSO, CRM, e-commerce, content management).
- Experience working in Middle East, Europe, or other international markets with multilingual requirements.
- Public work demonstrating your building: open-source MCP servers or skills, blog posts, demos, or talks.
