Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

ROLE OVERVIEW

The ASEAN AI Innovation Centre is the overseas R&D hub of our AI Business Group, localizing mature AI products from China and building new AI products for Malaysia and broader ASEAN markets, with a focus on energy and education.

We are hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) — one of the fastest-growing roles in the AI industry. An FDE is an engineer embedded inside enterprise customers’ environments who ships working AI systems, not slides. The industry has learned that most enterprise AI pilots fail on integration, not model quality; the FDE exists to close the gap between an impressive demo and a system running reliably inside the customer’s real (and often messy) technology stack.

At our Centre, you sit between three teams: sales brings the opportunity, you make the AI solution actually work inside the customer’s environment, and the delivery team industrializes deployment, training, and support. Your ground is the hardest part: discovery in the customer’s real systems, custom integrations, agentic workflows tuned to their use case, and evaluation that convinces their engineers and security team.

This is a hands-on individual-contributor role — you write the code, run the workshops, and debug in the customer’s environment yourself. We use AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, and similar) daily, which is what makes one FDE able to do what used to take a project team.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Discovery & Scoping: Sit with the customer’s technical and business teams to understand their real environment: existing systems (SCADA, EMS, ERP, IT), data quality, compliance constraints, and what success means in measurable terms.

• Embedded Solution Engineering: Design and build customer-specific solutions on top of our products: AI agent workflows, RAG pipelines over the customer’s own data, integrations with their legacy systems, and custom extensions their use case demands.

• Rapid POC Build: Turn POC scope agreed with sales and the Product Manager into a working system in days, not months, using AI-assisted development; demonstrate it on the customer’s data, in their environment.

• Evaluation & Trust: Build the evaluation sets and safety demonstrations that convince the customer’s engineering and security teams the system is reliable enough for production.

• Production Hardening & Reuse: Harden successful customizations into maintainable modules with the engineering team, and feed reusable patterns back into the platform so the next customer starts further ahead.

• Field-to-Product Loop: Convert field learnings into concrete platform requirements with the Product Manager and architecture track; you see the gaps before anyone else does.

WHAT YOU MUST BRING

• 4+ years of hands-on software engineering experience (Python and/or TypeScript preferred), with solid API, database, and integration skills.

• Practical experience with LLM application patterns: RAG, prompt engineering, tool calling, or agentic workflows — built something real, not just followed tutorials.

• Comfort operating in ambiguous, imperfect customer environments: undocumented systems, messy data, shifting requirements — and finding a pragmatic path anyway.

• Strong communication skills: able to run a discovery workshop with business users in the morning and debug an integration with their IT team in the afternoon.

• Daily use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) as your force multiplier.

• Willingness to spend substantial time at customer sites in Malaysia, with occasional travel elsewhere in ASEAN.

WHAT YOU CAN LEARN HERE

• The FDE craft itself — one of the highest-leverage, fastest-growing career paths in the AI industry, practiced on real enterprise problems.

• Agentic AI deployment patterns: multi-step agent workflows, RAG over industrial data, evaluation frameworks, and AI security conversations with enterprise customers.

• Energy and education domain depth: solar O&M, power forecasting, energy management, and how AI creates measurable value in these workflows.

• Multi-market solution experience across Malaysia and Southeast Asia.

LANGUAGE

Proficiency in English is essential. Proficiency in Chinese (Mandarin) is strongly preferred. Malay is a plus for on-site work and local coordination.

WHY JOIN US

• Be the founding FDE of the Centre and define how this emerging role works in the ASEAN market.

• Highest-leverage engineering seat in the company: your work is the difference between a POC that impresses and a system that ships.

• AI-first team culture: every team member uses AI tools daily; you will work alongside AI coding agents, not just other engineers.

• 3-year strategic incubation: no short-term revenue pressure. Focus on building solutions that actually work.

TEAM CONTEXT

You will work in a tight triangle with the sales team (Overseas Business Group, opportunity and commercial ownership), the delivery engineers (deployment, training, and support), and the engineering team (platform architecture and product features), with product requirements flowing through the AI-Native Product Manager. The division of labor is deliberate: sales opens the door, you make the AI work in the customer’s world, delivery keeps it running. You report to the Senior Software Engineers (Architecture Track), who ensure what you build in the field stays consistent with the platform.