Forward Deployed Engineer - AI/ML Data Science
Cengage Group · Nashville, TN
$117,100–$187,300from the description
Jul 23, 2026
Nashville, TN
Jul 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A hands-on engineering leadership role focused on deploying AI-powered learning tools — including RAG-based course assistants, LTI integrations, and automated evaluation frameworks — directly within strategic university partner environments. The position involves writing production code in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript, architecting agentic AI workflows, ensuring compliance with education data-privacy standards, and mentoring other field engineers. It suits a senior engineer with deep LMS integration experience and a background in customer-embedded or implementation-focused roles.
Senior level · 7+ years · Remote · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 9 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 6,000 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 1,250–10,900
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The job title is 'Lead Field Development Engineer' with no explicit seniority level word; the title states no level. However, the 7+ years of engineering experience plus 3+ years in a customer-embedded field role, mentorship responsibilities, and C-suite presentation duties firmly support a Senior classification.
AWS is listed as preferred ('AWS is preferred') within the required qualifications block, with specific AWS services named as examples. It is treated as a hard gate on cloud platform proficiency (with AWS as the preferred option), and the specific services (Lambda, ECS/EKS, RDS/Aurora, S3, API Gateway, CloudWatch) are listed as preferred since they appear as illustrative examples rather than individually gated requirements.
xAPI and Caliper are listed together as interchangeable learning analytics standards under the required qualifications block; emitted as one skill with the other as an alternative.
LMS platforms (Canvas, Blackboard, D2L, Moodle) and Cengage products (MindTap, WebAssign) appear in the responsibilities/context sections describing what will be built, not in a hard-requirements block; marked as preferred.
The graduate degree and AWS/GCP certifications appear only under Preferred Qualifications; the degree requirement is set to None.
The compensation figure ($117,100–$187,300/year) is the base pay range. A 15% annual discretionary incentive bonus target is also mentioned but is not guaranteed and is not included in the comp fields.
The role is a genuine hybrid between a senior software developer (writing and owning production code) and a field/solutions engineering function. 15-1252 is chosen as primary because the JD explicitly states 'you will write and own production code' and describes building production systems; 15-1299 is noted as a runner-up given the strong customer-embedded, field-deployment framing.
Read the full posting
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