Forward Deployed Engineer — AI-Native Software Engineer 

We build integrations and customizations for major higher-ed enterprise systems, and we build them differently than most shops: our developers work inside an AI-native, agent-assisted engineering environment we’ve built in-house, where specification and pipeline-building agents turn requirements and legacy source code into working, deployable integrations — with the developer reviewing, refining, testing, and shipping.

This is a Forward Deployed Engineer role: you sit close to the customer, learn how their institution actually runs — enrollment, financial aid, admissions, records — and translate that real business process into a pipeline that implements it correctly. You have AI tools at every step of that journey: understanding requirements, generating specs, building pipelines, writing tests. What you don’t get from AI is the judgment of whether you’re building the right thing. You steer. You decide the destination. You own whether it’s correct when it ships.

You don’t need higher-ed experience to apply. Most of our best people didn’t have it either — they learned the domain on the job. What you do need is real database and API chops, genuine fluency working with AI agents rather than around them, and the curiosity to actually understand a business process before you automate it.

Key Responsibilities

• Work directly with customer stakeholders to understand how their institution’s business processes actually work, including exceptions, workarounds, and edge cases that may not be captured in formal requirements
• Build new integrations based on that understanding, using AI agents to move from specifications to working solutions that reflect real business needs
• Migrate legacy on-premise business logic, often written in older procedural SQL dialects, into modern cloud-based integration pipelines while understanding why the existing logic works the way it does and preserving the intended business behavior
• Diagnose, maintain, and extend production integrations, including systems with limited or missing documentation where the intended logic must be understood from existing code and data
• Build custom APIs when standard platform APIs don’t fully support the required use case or performance needs
• Own the full delivery cycle: review and refine AI-generated solutions, validate them against technical and business requirements, test, deploy, and communicate the solution to the customer

Required Qualifications

Technical fundamentals

• 2+ years of professional software development experience. In exceptional cases we also consider students who can demonstrate these skills through personal projects, hackathons, or internship
• Ability to read and reason through procedural SQL (PL/SQL or similar), write clean SQL yourself, and work comfortably with both Oracle and PostgreSQL 
• Hands-on experience consuming APIs and writing JavaScript to manipulate and transform data — you don’t need our specific vendor’s platform, you’ll learn it fast 
• Genuine, hands-on fluency with AI agents: building or configuring them, writing and iterating prompts, and orchestrating multi-step workflows. Professional work, personal projects, or hackathons all count. You steer the agent rather than treat it as a black box 
• Interest in working with AI agents as your core tool, not a side experiment 
• Understanding of the full software development lifecycle (requirements → specification → development → testing → deployment → documentation) and clean work in Git with versioned releases  

Communication & Collaboration 

• Confident conversational English — you’ll be on calls with customer technical teams 
• High energy, genuinely enjoy talking to people and solving problems live, not just heads-down coding 
• Willingness to dig into a business process until you understand it well enough to design for it, and to own whether the solution is right — not just whether it runs 
• Strong team player — comfortable working in a collaborative environment with a shared backlog and regular syncs, not solo work 

How success is measured

You’re evaluated on integrations shipped across three kinds of work — new builds, legacy migrations, and production enhancements — and on whether what you ship actually matches how the institution really works, not just how the ticket described it. AI tools support you at every step; the judgment calls, and the accountability for getting them right, are yours. 

Prior Experience Not Required

No prior higher-ed, Banner, or Colleague experience required. No enterprise-integration background required. If you’ve got the fundamentals above — and the willingness to go learn a business process instead of waiting to be handed a spec — we’ll teach you the rest.