Forward Deployed Engineer

Overview

LLR Partners is hiring two Forward Deployed Engineers to build the AI-native products that generate real operating leverage across the firm — more AUM per head, more decisions per hour, more institutional memory retained in the firm. You will work shoulder-to-shoulder with LLR's teams — starting with Investment, Origination and the Value Creation Team, and expanding across every function — to ship agentic workflows, custom web apps and enterprise knowledge infrastructure from problem framing to production in weeks.

This is a mid-level seat with real ownership. You will not just consume off-the-shelf AI tools; you will build custom MCP servers, reusable Claude Skills, RAG pipelines, and the semantic and judgement layers that make every agent trustworthy at scale.

Accountabilities

• Ship AI-native internal products. Build and own the agentic workflows, copilots and internal tools that investment, origination, investor relations, operations, HR, finance and the value creation team every day.
• Build the platform layer. Custom MCP servers exposing LLR's data to every agent; RAG pipelines with chunking, embeddings, vector stores, retrieval/generation and evals; reusable Claude Skills that codify LLR patterns.
• Ship custom internal web apps. js, React or Streamlit front-ends that put agents in the hands of non-technical users — polished, fast, production-ready.
• Contribute to the knowledge graph. Help stand up the enterprise knowledge graph and semantic search that turn LLR's data into one queryable brain.
• Build the judgement layer. LLM-as-judge evals, deterministic assertions, guardrails and observability — plus approval flows, confidence thresholds and escalation paths so no agent output reaches an LP, an IC or a portfolio company without a person in the loop.
• Bring rigor. Instrument everything — adoption, usage, hours returned — so the value of every agent is measured, not hoped for.
• Partner across the firm. Sit with deal teams, origination, IR, operations, HR, finance and the Value Creation Team to identify their highest-leverage workflows and ship for them end-to-end.
• Drive AI adoption across the firm. Run regular trainings and office hours, write playbooks, and sit with users until the tool is habitual — an agent nobody uses is a cost, not an asset.

Skills and Requirements

• Ability to work in-person in LLR's Philadelphia office
• 2-4 years of professional software engineering, with at least 1 year shipping production LLM applications, agents or retrieval systems to real users.
• Strong Python (async, typing, testing); TypeScript, Next.js or Streamlit for shipping custom web apps and internal tools.
• Deep hands-on experience with foundation model APIs and SDKs (Anthropic, OpenAI) — tool use, function calling, structured outputs and prompt engineering.
• Built RAG pipelines end-to-end — chunking, embeddings, vector stores (pgvector, Pinecone or similar) and retrieval and generation evaluation.
• Built custom MCP servers and reusable Claude Skills — not just consumed them. You understand the protocols, can design new integrations, and know when to reach for a Skill vs. an MCP server.
• AI-native engineer. Daily fluency across Claude and ChatGPT ecosystems — Connectors, Claude Code, Codex, Cowork — and agentic frameworks (LangGraph, PydanticAI, DSPy) shipped in production. You know the tradeoffs and pick the right tool per problem.
• Track record as a forward-deployed, founding, or early engineer on a small, high-ownership team — you've worked directly with non-technical users on real problems.
• Experience designing for regulated environments — data classification, PII handling, scoped access, information barriers and audit logs on every agent action.

Nice to Have

• Experience inside private equity, financial services, consulting or another regulated, document-heavy environment.
• Comfort in an Azure environment — including familiarity with Azure AI Foundry — with modern deployment platforms (Render, Vercel, Supabase) and Git-based workflows.
• Experience building harnesses for agents – either using a harness framework or standing up your own.
• Knowledge graph or GraphRAG experience — bonus for enterprise search architectures at scale.
• Experience communicating technical work to non-technical stakeholders through writing, decks and live demos.
• Flexibility with project management and workflow tools (JIRA, Trello, Linear, Asana or similar).
• Working knowledge of PE-stack data (PitchBook, SourceScrub, Grata, Allvue, Chronograph) and the deal lifecycle — IC memos, LP reporting, fund structures — enough to build useful tools without a translator.
• Curiosity about and informed perspective on the evolving AI and agent ecosystem.
• Awareness of token economics and inference cost — model selection, prompt caching, routing small vs. frontier models by task.
• Experience extracting structure from messy documents — PDF parsing, table extraction, meeting transcripts, email threads.
• Observability tooling for agents in production — LangSmith, Langfuse, Braintrust or similar for tracing and debugging.