Forward Deployed Engineer - AI Vision Systems - Quebec, Canada

Forward Deployed Engineer — AI Vision Systems Remote | Montreal, QC (preferred) | Full-time

About the role

This is a post-sales, customer-facing deployment role at a fast-growing AI startup building computer vision and predictive systems for manufacturers. The company has grown from 35 to 70 people this year on the back of strong sales momentum, and is now scaling its deployment team to bring those signed customers live.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you own the end-to-end technical deployment of AI vision systems into customer manufacturing environments. You will be the primary technical presence on-site, working closely with sales, account management, and a technical project manager to scope, integrate, and deliver working systems — and you won't leave until the product does what was promised.

This is not a role for someone who wants to write code in isolation. You'll be on factory floors, troubleshooting live production environments, training operators, and building trust with customers who are conservative about their technology and their IP.

What you'll do

• Own the full deployment lifecycle for manufacturing customers — from scoping and integration through to production hardening and handover
• Embed with customer operations and IT teams as the primary technical contact on-site
• Install and configure edge AI hardware (NVIDIA Jetson or equivalent) within customer facilities
• Integrate AI vision systems with customer OT/IT stacks including OPC-UA, Modbus, and PLC systems
• Build and iterate data pipelines from edge capture through to cloud — model deployment, monitoring, and feedback loops
• Troubleshoot software, networking, and integration issues in live production environments
• Document architectures and configurations, producing formal handover artifacts for long-term support
• Train customer operators and engineers in both French and English on deployed systems
• Work as a secondary deployment engineer for your first 30–60 days alongside an experienced FDE before taking on your own accounts
• Participate in pre-sales scoping calls and feed field learnings back to the product and engineering team
• Support on-site data collection and annotation as needed

What the work actually looks like

Customers span food manufacturing, building materials, and other industrial sectors. Use cases include defect detection on packaging lines, monitoring for discoloured or malformed products, ergonomic compliance monitoring on factory floors, and employee safety verification. Once deployed, systems feed insights into a customer-facing app that allows plant managers to query production data by shift, line, and time period.

When you're not on-site, you're working remotely. On-site time is estimated at 25–50% depending on active deployments. You'll typically manage one to three accounts at a time depending on complexity.