Forward Deployed AI Engineer

As a Forward Deployed AI Engineer at Sardine, you will act as the crucial bridge between our state-of-the-art AI capabilities and our clients' most complex fraud, compliance, and workflow challenges. You will embed directly with clients to understand their unique operational pain points, scope requirements, and build custom AI agents and intelligent workflows into production environments. This role demands the technical rigor of a seasoned data scientist combined with the strategic, client-facing acumen to drive projects from conception to deployment.

What you'll do

• Embed directly with clients to gather requirements, translating ambiguous operational challenges into concrete technical architectures and delivering high-impact, AI-driven solutions with extreme ownership.
• Train and deploy custom AI agents to prevent fraud and automate complex financial crime workflows across a diverse portfolio of use cases.
• Utilize advanced prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and rigorous evaluation frameworks to continuously optimize AI agent performance, ensuring high accuracy, safety, and reliability.
• Champion an AI-first approach across internal teams and client engagements, demonstrating the tangible business impact of advanced machine learning interventions.
• Establish and evolve AI risk metrics, the supporting datasets, and evaluation pipelines used to measure the causal impact of deployed agents.
• Collaborate tightly with internal engineering and product teams to scale custom models into production, ensuring seamless integration and optimized operational performance.

What you bring

• 5+ years of experience in Data Science or Applied AI.
• Proficiency in Python and SQL for complex data manipulation, pipeline building, and model integration.
• A creative, critical thinker with a "get-things-done" mentality who thrives autonomously and is obsessed with delivering measurable business value.
• Exceptional ability to own the end-to-end solution lifecycle, including the ability to translate ambiguous client challenges into concrete requirements and deliver the final product.

What we offer

• Generous compensation in cash and equity with early exercise for all options, including pre-vested.
• Remote-first culture: work from anywhere in the United States or Canada.
• Flexible paid time off and year-end break.
• Health insurance, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents (US and Canada).
• 4% matching in 401(k) / RRSP (US and Canada).
• MacBook Pro delivered to your door.
• One-time stipend to set up a home office with desk, chair, screen, and other essentials.
• Monthly meal stipend.
• Monthly social meet-up stipend.
• Annual health and wellness stipend.
• Annual learning stipend.

About Sardine

Sardine is the leading agentic risk platform for fighting financial crime, helping organizations stop fraud in real time, prevent AI-driven attacks, and automate fraud and AML operations. The platform is strengthened by one of the fastest-growing fraud consortiums in the market, spanning more than 6 billion profiled devices, 800 million consumers, and 3 million businesses worldwide. Leading companies including FIS, GoDaddy, Intuit, Edward Jones, ZoomInfo, and Checkout.com rely on Sardine to secure and grow trust in their products.