Forward Deployed Engineer Intern
Field Service & Critical Infrastructure
By applying to this position you will have an opportunity to share your preferred working location and start date.
About the job
A demo runs on clean data. Production does not. The manuals are scanned PDFs from 2004, half the failure history lives in free-text technician notes, and the parts master disagrees with the CMMS. Forward deployed engineering is where that mess meets the agent—and where it gets resolved.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer Intern, you sit on the customer side of the platform. You help stand up a customer’s company brain on their own systems of record—ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce/ServiceMax, or their CMMS—get it answering the questions their technicians actually ask, and then tune it against the failures that cost them most: repeat truck rolls, no-fault-found returns, and escalations that should never have escalated. You will write the integration glue, shape retrieval and agent behavior around their equipment, and find out what breaks when someone uses your work with gloves on at 2am.
You will work alongside a forward deployed engineer and the product team, and you will see your deployments in front of real customers rather than in a staging environment. What you learn goes straight into the roadmap; our product engineers are a Slack message away, not a quarter away.
Strong performers are our first call for full-time roles.
Minimum qualifications
- Currently pursuing a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science, software engineering, data engineering, or a related technical field, or graduated within the last 12 months.
- Available for at least a 16 week commitment of at least 40 hours per week.
- Programming experience in Python, TypeScript, or a comparable language, including working with REST APIs and JSON.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience integrating enterprise or third-party APIs such as SAP, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Zendesk, or Jira, including authentication, pagination, and rate limits.
- Hands-on experience with LLMs, retrieval pipelines, embeddings, evaluation, or agent frameworks, through coursework, projects, or personal work.
- Experience turning messy, unstructured data into something queryable: scanned PDFs, free-text notes, equipment logs, or inconsistent part numbers.
- Exposure to a physical or clinical environment—a lab, plant, hospital, machine shop, data center, or field maintenance setting.
- Comfort in front of a customer: debugging live, saying “I do not know yet, here is how I will find out,” and following up the same day.
Responsibilities
- Stand up customer company brains on live systems of record and get them answering real technician questions.
- Build and maintain integrations across SAP, ServiceNow, Salesforce/ServiceMax, and CMMS environments, including data mapping and incremental sync.
- Turn unstructured service content—manuals, fault code tables, work orders, technician notes—into retrievable, evaluated knowledge.
- Tune agent behavior for a customer’s equipment and failure modes, and build the evaluations that prove it actually improved.
- Instrument deployments so first-time fix rate, deflection, and escalation impact are measured rather than asserted.
- Debug production issues alongside customer engineering and service teams, with clear written handoffs.
- Join ride-alongs and war rooms where customers allow it, and document what technicians actually do versus what the workflow assumes.
- Present a deployment capstone to the founding team at the end of the internship.
Compensation and logistics
This is a paid internship with a fixed stipend.
About Ascendo AI
Ascendo AI builds Physical AI agents for critical infrastructure and field service. Rather than summarizing manuals, our inference engine captures the operational judgment of a customer’s best technicians and scales it to every technician, in every language, on every shift—with the human in command. The platform runs in production across energy, telecom, medical devices, and defense, supports more than 10,000 products in 161 languages, and is SOC 2 Type 2 certified. Teams operate out of Palo Alto and Chennai.
Ascendo AI is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, disability, age, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, genetic information, or any other basis protected by law.
Interested in this role?
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