Forward Deployed AI Engineer

ABOUT KATONIC

Katonic AI builds the operating system for sovereign AI. Governments and large enterprises run our platform on their own infrastructure, in their own country, under their own control. No data leaves their environment.

We are live with MODON across 36 industrial cities in Saudi Arabia, and with Pilipinas AI and ePLDT on the first sovereign AI cloud in Southeast Asia. We are hiring 10 Forward Deployed AI Engineers across India and Manila.

THE ROLE

Forward Deployed AI Engineers turn a customer's business problem into something running in production on the customer's own infrastructure.

You sit with the customer. You learn how their work actually gets done, which is never how the org chart says it does. Then you build the thing: an agent, a retrieval pipeline over their documents, a fine-tuned model, a workflow that removes a bottleneck someone has lived with for years. You deploy it into their environment, you watch it meet real users, and you stay with it until it holds up.

The engineering design review that took 3 hours per document and now takes 49 seconds is forward deployed work. So is the 95% acceleration in information retrieval, and the investor approval cycle that got 50% faster. An engineer in this seat built those.

You will not be handed a spec. You will be handed a customer.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Sit with customers and find the problems worth solving
• Build agents on Katonic Studio, wired to real systems through tools and MCP servers
• Build knowledge and retrieval pipelines over customer data
• Deploy and fine-tune models, choosing the right one for the constraint rather than the biggest one
• Hand over cleanly, so the customer's own team can run it without you

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• Minimum 2 years' experience in the IT industry
• Strong programming ability, and comfort reading code you did not write. Python is what we mostly build in
• Solid fundamentals: Linux, HTTP and APIs, containers, databases
• You debug from evidence, not from guesses
• Energized by customers, not drained by them
• You write clearly. This work is half engineering and half making yourself understood
• A genuine drive to learn

WHAT YOU DON'T NEED

Prior AI experience. We mean this. If you have solid engineering fundamentals, we will teach you the AI. Some of the strongest forward deployed engineers in this industry came from backend, platform, data and integration work.

WHAT YOU GET

• Immediate start
• ESOP, real ownership in a fast-growing company
• A front-row seat as we scale across 11+ countries
• Work that reaches real customers, fast, at national scale
• Remote-first, working with a team across Sydney, Dubai, Mumbai and Manila

HOW TO APPLY

Apply with your CV. Prefer email? works too. Either way, a few lines about something you built and what broke tells us more than a cover letter.