Lead OpenAI Forward Deployed Engineer - GPS

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