Forward Deployed Engineer

Company Description QI AI Labs is an AI product studio focused on building practical, evidence-backed software and agentic workflows for modern enterprises across Southeast Asia and global markets. The team prioritizes real-world impact over speculative AI hype, using a validate-first approach to solve everyday operational bottlenecks. Its ecosystem includes solutions for call operations (OneReach), mail triage and drafting, marketing intelligence through social signal scanning, secure AI assistants for private document review, and cost- and policy-aware LLM routing. QI AI Labs works in the open with rigorous research, continuous validation, and production-grade execution. The company is headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Qi AI Labs is looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) who can turn real business problems into working AI solutions.

This is not a role where you receive a complete specification and simply implement tickets.

You will work directly with customers, understand how their business actually operates, identify where AI can create measurable value, and then design, build, integrate and deploy the solution.

You will sit between engineering, product and the customer.

What You'll Do

* Work directly with customers to understand their workflows, systems and operational pain points.

* Translate ambiguous business requirements into practical technical solutions.

* Build rapid AI prototypes and turn successful prototypes into production deployments.

* Integrate AI with existing customer systems such as CRM, ERP, databases, APIs and legacy applications.

* Build solutions using LLMs, AI agents, RAG, MCP, workflow automation and tool calling.

* Design backend services, APIs and integration layers where required.

* Evaluate models and architectures based on accuracy, latency, cost and reliability.

* Troubleshoot problems across the full stack — from model behaviour to APIs, infrastructure and customer systems.

* Work closely with the Qi AI Labs product and engineering team to turn repeated customer problems into reusable products and capabilities.

* Own projects from problem → prototype → deployment → improvement.

What We're Looking For

You should be comfortable building things, not just discussing them.

Core requirements:

* Strong software engineering fundamentals.

* Experience with Python, JavaScript/TypeScript or similar languages.

* Experience building APIs, backend services and system integrations.

* Practical understanding of LLMs and modern AI application development.

* Comfortable working with incomplete or changing requirements.

* Able to independently investigate problems and propose solutions.

* Able to communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical customers.

* Strong ownership mentality — when something breaks, you investigate until you understand why.

Experience with some of the following is a strong advantage:

LLM APIs · Open-source models · RAG · MCP · AI Agents · Vector Databases · Docker · Linux · Cloud Infrastructure · SQL · REST APIs · Webhooks · Workflow Automation · Voice AI · Computer Vision

The Kind of Person Who Fits

You will probably enjoy this role if your instinct when someone describes a problem is:

Give me access to the system. Let me understand how it works, and I'll build something.

You don't need to know every technology beforehand.

You need to be able to learn quickly, reason from first principles, build quickly and take ownership of the outcome.

Why Qi AI Labs

You won't spend six months building features nobody uses.

You will work on real problems with real businesses and see your solutions deployed into actual operations.

The goal is simple:

Find where AI creates real leverage. Build it. Deploy it. Prove it works.