Forward Deployed AI Architect

Own the last mile between a cutting-edge agentic AI platform and the customer teams who depend on it.

Our client is a well-funded clinical AI company. Fresh off a successful seed round and guided by a board of seasoned advisers who have held C-suite roles at Global 2000 enterprises, the company is building an agentic AI product layer for the healthcare and life-sciences market. It works hand in hand with a select group of clients, combining product, professional services, and advisory across the pharma and technology sectors. Headquartered in the Tri-State area with a global development center in India, the company has real financial runway, a clear product vision, and the founding-level ambition to shape how its technology reaches customers and creates value in the real world.

This is a Forward Deployed AI Architect role: a blend of product thinking, hands-on agentic AI engineering, and direct customer partnership. You will embed with the company's customers, translate their real-world needs into working solutions on the platform, and carry everything you learn back into the product. Because the company delivers through a blend of product, professional services, and advisory, you sit right at the center of how value gets designed, built, and delivered. This is not a behind-the-glass research seat, and it is not a purely back-end engineering role. It is built for someone who is energized by ambiguity, moves quickly, and wants to be in the room with the customer while the product takes shape.

This is a founding-team-level opportunity at a company coming off its seed round. Expect an entrepreneurial, agile environment where you will wear several hats, move fast, and have outsized influence on both the product and the direction of the business.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

This list represents the major duties of the role and is not all-inclusive. The successful candidate may be asked to perform related duties as the company grows.

Forward-Deployed Solution Delivery

• Embed directly with customers, on-site roughly two days per week, to understand their workflows, data, and goals, and to deliver working solutions on the company's agentic AI platform.

• Serve as the technical face of the company to customer stakeholders, translating business and operational needs into clearly scoped, buildable solutions.

• Configure, extend, and deploy AI agents to solve concrete customer problems end to end, from the first working session through production rollout and adoption.

Agentic Product & Architecture

• Design and orchestrate AI agents across the relevant workflows, including reasoning, retrieval, tool use, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop review.

• Define the architecture, integration patterns, and best practices that let the platform deploy quickly and reliably from one customer to the next.

• Evaluate and integrate modern LLMs, agent frameworks, and AI tooling, and make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions.

Product Feedback & Roadmap Influence

• Bring firsthand customer insight back to the product and engineering teams, shaping the roadmap and turning repeated field needs into productized features.

• Partner closely with the founders and product leadership to sharpen priorities and move solutions from bespoke builds toward a repeatable product.

Enablement & Trust

• Establish governance, security, and quality practices appropriate for a regulated, healthcare-adjacent setting.

• Mentor and enable both customer and internal teams as they adopt agentic ways of working.

Qualifications

The requirements below are representative of the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to succeed in this role.

Required

• A strong track record building and shipping software or AI products, paired with a genuine product mindset: you think about the user and the outcome, not only the code.

• Hands-on experience designing and implementing agentic AI or LLM-based systems (agents, orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, and evaluation).

• Proven experience with generative AI, LLMs, and modern agent frameworks.

• Direct, customer-facing delivery experience. You are comfortable being on-site with customers and owning both the relationship and the outcome.

• A demonstrated starter mindset. You are highly motivated and self-directed, and you thrive in an entrepreneurial, agile, high-ambiguity startup environment.

• Based in or able to reliably commute within the Tri-State area, and willing to be on-site with customers roughly two days per week.

Preferred

• Product management or product-owner experience, or a clear track record of shaping product direction from the field.

• Experience with agent frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, or the OpenAI Agents SDK.

• Familiarity with RAG, vector databases, knowledge graphs, LLM evaluation, and observability tooling.

Nice to Have

• Clinical trial, pharma, or biotech domain experience.

• Prior experience at an early-stage or venture-backed startup.

Engagement & Location

• Structure: Full-time, permanent, direct-hire position.

• Location: Tri-State area (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut). Flexible and remote-friendly, with on-site customer visits roughly two days per week.

• Compensation: Base salary of $200,000 to $220,000, plus a performance-based annual bonus 

The compensation offered will be commensurate with experience, skills, qualifications, and other relevant factors.

About the Search

This search is being managed by Summit Strategic Search on behalf of our client. This is a full-time, permanent position where the successful candidate will be hired directly by the end client.

Equal Opportunity Commitment: Summit Strategic Search and our client are equal opportunity partners. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Accommodations & Support: We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities during the application and interview process. If you require assistance, please contact us at admin@summitstrategicsearch.com. We maintain a zero-tolerance policy for harassment and provide all employees with dedicated reporting channels to ensure a safe, professional work environment.

Selection & Onboarding: As this is a direct-hire role within a regulated industry, the end client's standard hiring protocols apply. This includes, but is not limited to, a comprehensive background check prior to the start of employment. All hiring decisions are made solely by the end client.