Forward Deployed Staff - Education

As Forward Deployed Staff - Education, you'll work across the full spectrum of what we do: building production AI systems, delivering technical training, and creating educational content. This is not a siloed role—you'll move fluidly between implementation, teaching, and content creation based on what's needed.

The "Forward Deployed" Philosophy:

Everyone at LevelUp Labs is a generalist. You'll be expected to contribute across engineering, training, content, and client work. However, this role has a spike in education and curriculum development—you're someone who loves teaching and creating learning experiences, while still being a strong engineer.

What "spike" means: You can do all three, but your edge is in making complex things learnable. You're the person who builds something and immediately thinks about how to teach it to others.

• Design and implement production-grade AI systems alongside client engineering teams

• Build LLM-powered applications: RAG systems, agents, evaluation frameworks, etc.

• Own technical architecture decisions and trade-offs

• Write code that's maintainable, tested, documented, and built to last

• Debug complex issues across the stack

• Work directly with client engineering teams as a peer, not an outside consultant

• Understand client constraints, existing systems, and organizational context

• Communicate progress and challenges to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

• Transfer knowledge to client teams—leave them better than you found them

• Distill learnings from implementations into patterns we can reuse

• Contribute to our courses, documentation, and internal tooling

• Stay current with AI developments—evaluate what actually works in production

• Participate in technical discussions and code reviews

Engineering

• 2+ years building production software systems

• Strong programming skills (Python required; experience with TypeScript/JavaScript, Go, or Rust a plus)

• Deep experience with AI/ML systems: LLMs, RAG, agents, fine-tuning, evaluations

• Strong understanding of software engineering best practices (testing, CI/CD, observability, documentation)

• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)

Production Mindset

• You've shipped systems that handle real traffic and real users

• You think about failure modes, edge cases, and operational concerns

• You know the difference between demo code and production code

• You've been paged at 2am and fixed something that was broken

Communication

• Can explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders

• Comfortable presenting architecture and progress to client leadership

• Clear written communication (documentation, design docs, async updates)

• Can work effectively with client teams across different cultures and timezones

Mindset

• Self-directed—you don't need someone telling you what to do next

• Comfortable with ambiguity and rapidly changing requirements

• Ego-free: you'll do whatever needs doing to ship

• Strong opinions, loosely held

• Experience with enterprise clients (understanding their constraints and pace)

• Prior consulting or client-facing engineering experience

• Contributions to open source projects

• Background with observability and evaluation frameworks for AI

• Experience leading technical projects or mentoring engineers

• Competitive compensation (base + performance bonuses + outcome-based bonus per engagement)

• Work on challenging problems with leading companies

• Learn from a team with 30+ enterprise implementations and published AI research

• Flexibility: remote-first, async-friendly

• Direct impact: you're building real systems, not maintaining legacy code

• Growth: as an early team member, you'll shape our engineering culture