What Companies Hiring Forward-Deployed Engineers Actually Want

Become an AI Engineer at parsity.io (https://parsity.io) I recruit for AI roles on the side and I pulled real, live forward-deployed engineer postings and broke down exactly what they're screening for. Turns out it's not what most "learn AI" content tells you. What's actually in these postings: • Real applied AI experience: shipped production agents, not tutorial chatbots • RAG, retrieval quality, evals, and agent-to-agent communication • Surprisingly low years-of-experience requirements compared to typical senior roles • The ability to explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders • Voice AI showing up more and more as a differentiator — mentioned in this episode: AI Voice Pioneers (https://www.skool.com/pioneers) and Retell AI (https://www.retellai.com) • Degrees mattering a lot less than you'd think, at least in the Bay Area Want to actually build one of these skills instead of just reading about it? Free RAG project: parsity.io/ai-with-rag If you're trying to reverse-engineer your way into one of these roles, this is what the actual postings are telling you to build toward.