NextLink Labs

Role Description NextLink Labs is seeking a versatile Software Architect to join our Custom Software Development consulting team. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in Ruby on Rails alongside a broad generalist's toolkit, and is comfortable moving across languages, frameworks, and problem domains as our client portfolio demands. This person will architect and build web applications for our clients while also contributing strategically to elevate our consulting practice. Key Responsibilities - Design, develop, and maintain scalable web applications and APIs using Ruby on Rails - Move fluently between Rails and other frameworks/languages depending on the client engagement - Architect and implement service-oriented and microservices-based solutions - Communicate directly with clients to give demonstrations and receive feedback - Review legacy software applications to identify and remediate technical debt - Work in an agile team environment with weekly stand ups - Engage in code reviews of your teammates' work - Contribute to internal NextLink Labs documentation and code templates - Engage in thought leadership through blog posts, webinars, and other marketing materials - Assist Sales and Marketing by joining scoping calls and providing technical input Qualifications - 5+ years of experience building production web applications with Ruby on Rails - Strong understanding of ActiveRecord, Rails conventions, background job processing (Sidekiq/Resque), and database optimization - Experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs and integrating with third-party services - Proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) - Experience with GO & Kafka is desired - 3+ years of experience with at least one additional major framework or language (e.g., Django/Python, Node.js, Java) - Experience with modern frontend frameworks (React, Vue, or similar) - Ability to work independently and take ownership across a variety of software engagements - Ability to scope individual features and full software projects based on client requests - Excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal skills with the ability to build buy-in, facilitate compromise, and guide client expectations - Strong unit-testing and debugging abilities (RSpec, Minitest, or equivalent) - Proficient understanding of version control systems (Git) - Understanding of accessibility and security compliance - Understanding of fundamental design principles behind a scalable application - Strong problem-solving, analytical, and strategic thinking abilities, capable of making well-informed and timely decisions Nice to Have - Experience with DevOps tooling (AWS, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes) - Experience modernizing or migrating legacy Rails monoliths - Previous consulting or client-facing engineering experience Benefits - We're a technical consulting firm that values clarity, ownership, and outcomes - Competitive salary with bonus structure - Remote-first culture, flexible work schedule, and autonomy to do your best work - Healthcare (Medical, Dental, and Vision) and 401k - Responsibility and autonomy at a growing company - The opportunity to build something big and exciting - Paid parental leave - Visa Sponsorship

• Lead client engagements end-to-end, from kickoff through delivery and closeout, using agile, scrum, or hybrid methodologies as the engagement requires • Develop detailed project plans including scope, timelines, resources, and budget estimates aligned to SOW deliverables • Manage scope against the SOW: negotiate discrepancies with clients, drive prioritization decisions, and handle change orders cleanly • Drive project schedule and scope while protecting engagement economics and avoiding budget overruns • Own the internal logistics of running an engagement: budget tracking, forecasting, time tracking inputs, invoicing coordination, and resource alignment with delivery leadership • Maintain PM compliance and reporting responsibilities: engagement health updates, weekly status reports, sprint reviews, and risk and issue management • Properly identify and differentiate risks from issues, and know when to escalate within the engagement and within NextLink • Facilitate backlog creation, ensuring tickets have clear definitions, acceptance criteria, and estimates, and manage delivery flow through Jira reports and team rituals • Build and maintain client trust through reliable delivery and consistent communication; facilitate proactive, sometimes tough, client conversations • Deliver against client business outcomes, not just the letter of the SOW, and collaborate with Delivery and Sales to surface expansion opportunities • Observe project teams and provide timely feedback focused on client value • Contribute to the broader NextLink PM practice through process improvements, templates, and cross-functional initiatives

• Lead client engagements end-to-end, from kickoff through delivery and closeout, using agile, scrum, or hybrid methodologies as the engagement requires • Develop detailed project plans including scope, timelines, resources, and budget estimates aligned to SOW deliverables • Manage scope against the SOW: negotiate discrepancies with clients, drive prioritization decisions, and handle change orders cleanly • Drive project schedule and scope while protecting engagement economics and avoiding budget overruns • Own the internal logistics of running an engagement: budget tracking, forecasting, time tracking inputs, invoicing coordination, and resource alignment with delivery leadership • Maintain PM compliance and reporting responsibilities: engagement health updates, weekly status reports, sprint reviews, and risk and issue management • Properly identify and differentiate risks from issues, and know when to escalate within the engagement and within NextLink • Facilitate backlog creation, ensuring tickets have clear definitions, acceptance criteria, and estimates, and manage delivery flow through Jira reports and team rituals • Build and maintain client trust through reliable delivery and consistent communication; facilitate proactive, sometimes tough, client conversations • Deliver against client business outcomes, not just the letter of the SOW, and collaborate with Delivery and Sales to surface expansion opportunities • Observe project teams and provide timely feedback focused on client value • Contribute to the broader NextLink PM practice through process improvements, templates, and cross-functional initiatives

• Design and build robust ETL/ELT pipelines and data infrastructure for AI-powered applications, ensuring high quality and availability of data • Implement end-to-end data pipelines for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), including data ingestion, chunking, embedding generation, vector store management, and retrieval optimization • Write evaluation suites and guardrails to measure quality, safety, cost, and latency before and after deployment • Integrate AI components into existing client systems via REST/GraphQL APIs, event streams, and cloud-native services on AWS, Azure, or GCP • Build production-grade applications on top of LLMs (Claude, GPT, open-source models), including chat interfaces, copilots, agents, and back-office automation • Develop agentic workflows using frameworks such as the Claude Agent SDK, LangGraph, or comparable tools, including tool use, planning, and multi-step orchestration • Run rapid prototyping sprints with clients, getting something demo-able in days, then iterating toward production • Document architectures, share learnings with the broader NextLink AI practice, and contribute to internal accelerators and reference implementations

• Lead client engagements end-to-end, from kickoff through delivery and closeout, using agile, scrum, or hybrid methodologies as the engagement requires • Develop detailed project plans including scope, timelines, resources, and budget estimates aligned to SOW deliverables • Manage scope against the SOW: negotiate discrepancies with clients, drive prioritization decisions, and handle change orders cleanly • Drive project schedule and scope while protecting engagement economics and avoiding budget overruns • Own the internal logistics of running an engagement: budget tracking, forecasting, time tracking inputs, invoicing coordination, and resource alignment with delivery leadership • Maintain PM compliance and reporting responsibilities: engagement health updates, weekly status reports, sprint reviews, and risk and issue management • Properly identify and differentiate risks from issues, and know when to escalate within the engagement and within NextLink • Facilitate backlog creation, ensuring tickets have clear definitions, acceptance criteria, and estimates, and manage delivery flow through Jira reports and team rituals • Build and maintain client trust through reliable delivery and consistent communication; facilitate proactive, sometimes tough, client conversations • Deliver against client business outcomes, not just the letter of the SOW, and collaborate with Delivery and Sales to surface expansion opportunities • Observe project teams and provide timely feedback focused on client value • Contribute to the broader NextLink PM practice through process improvements, templates, and cross-functional initiatives

• You'll work directly with clients on the design, build-out, and roll-out of production AI systems, collaborating closely with an AI Architect and focusing on the robust data infrastructure that makes AI applications work in the real world, using tools like Airflow, Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks. • As a 'forward deployed' engineer, you'll sit close to the customer's problem: discovering use cases, prototyping rapidly, hardening what works, and shipping it into the client's environment. • Your time will be spent on hands-on engineering, delivering ETL/ELT pipelines for AI-powered applications, RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and the supporting cloud infrastructure. • You'll partner directly with clients to translate ambiguous business problems into production AI systems. • You'll build the data infrastructure that underpins AI applications, develop RAG and agentic workflows on top of modern LLMs, write the evaluation suites and guardrails that keep those systems safe and performant, and integrate the whole thing into clients' existing software environments. • Between and during engagements, you'll contribute to NextLink's internal accelerators and reference implementations so the broader AI practice gets stronger over time.

• You'll work directly with clients on the design, build-out, and roll-out of production AI systems, collaborating closely with an AI Architect and focusing on the robust data infrastructure that makes AI applications work in the real world, using tools like Airflow, Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks. • You'll partner directly with clients to translate ambiguous business problems into production AI systems. • You'll build the data infrastructure that underpins AI applications, develop RAG and agentic workflows on top of modern LLMs, write the evaluation suites and guardrails that keep those systems safe and performant, and integrate the whole thing into clients' existing software environments. • Between and during engagements, you'll contribute to NextLink's internal accelerators and reference implementations so the broader AI practice gets stronger over time. You'll need to be technically deep, comfortable in ambiguity, and energized by direct client contact.

• Partner directly with clients to translate ambiguous business problems into production AI systems • Build the data infrastructure that underpins AI applications • Develop RAG and agentic workflows on top of modern LLMs • Write the evaluation suites and guardrails that keep those systems safe and performant • Integrate the whole system into clients' existing software environments • Contribute to NextLink's internal accelerators and reference implementations

• Lead client engagements end-to-end, from kickoff through delivery and closeout, using agile, scrum, or hybrid methodologies as the engagement requires • Develop detailed project plans including scope, timelines, resources, and budget estimates aligned to SOW deliverables • Manage scope against the SOW: negotiate discrepancies with clients, drive prioritization decisions, and handle change orders cleanly • Drive project schedule and scope while protecting engagement economics and avoiding budget overruns • Own the internal logistics of running an engagement: budget tracking, forecasting, time tracking inputs, invoicing coordination, and resource alignment with delivery leadership • Maintain PM compliance and reporting responsibilities: engagement health updates, weekly status reports, sprint reviews, and risk and issue management • Properly identify and differentiate risks from issues, and know when to escalate within the engagement and within NextLink • Facilitate backlog creation, ensuring tickets have clear definitions, acceptance criteria, and estimates, and manage delivery flow through Jira reports and team rituals • Build and maintain client trust through reliable delivery and consistent communication; facilitate proactive, sometimes tough, client conversations • Deliver against client business outcomes, not just the letter of the SOW, and collaborate with Delivery and Sales to surface expansion opportunities • Observe project teams and provide timely feedback focused on client value • Contribute to the broader NextLink PM practice through process improvements, templates, and cross-functional initiatives

Role Description NextLink Labs is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to join our growing AI practice. You'll work directly with clients on the design, build-out, and roll-out of production AI systems, collaborating closely with an AI Architect and focusing on the robust data infrastructure that makes AI applications work in the real world, using tools like Airflow, Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks. As a "forward deployed" engineer, you'll sit close to the customer's problem: - Discovering use cases - Prototyping rapidly - Hardening what works - Shipping it into the client's environment Your time will be spent on hands-on engineering, delivering ETL/ELT pipelines for AI-powered applications, RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and the supporting cloud infrastructure. This role has a strong consultative dimension and is distinct from pure backend development or pure research positions. Qualifications - 3–5 years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 1 year shipping AI/ML or LLM-based features to production - Strong Python skills; comfort with at least one of TypeScript/JavaScript, Go, or Java for integration work - Hands-on experience building applications with modern LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, etc.) - Background with data engineering tooling such as dbt, Airflow, Dagster, Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks - Working knowledge of RAG patterns, embedding models, and at least one vector store (pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, OpenSearch, etc.) - Solid grasp of one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including how to deploy containerized services and manage secrets/IAM - Experience writing tests, instrumenting code, and reasoning about observability, including for non-deterministic systems - Strong written and verbal English; comfortable presenting technical work to client engineering teams and non-technical stakeholders - Customer-facing instincts: you ask good questions, manage ambiguity well, and don't disappear when a problem gets messy Requirements - Prior experience in a consulting, agency, or forward-deployed/solutions-engineering role - Experience with agent frameworks (Claude Agent SDK, AWS Strands, etc.) and MCP (Model Context Protocol) - Familiarity with prompt engineering, evals frameworks, and structured-output techniques - Infrastructure-as-Code experience (Terraform, Pulumi, CDK) and CI/CD pipelines - Exposure to regulated industries (financial services, healthcare) and the data-handling practices they require - Contributions to open-source AI tooling or technical writing/speaking on applied AI topics Benefits - We're a technical consulting firm that values clarity, ownership, and outcomes - Remote-first, with a strong written communication culture (docs, async updates, clear PRs) - Investment in your growth, including access to LLM playgrounds, an internal AI guild, and senior architects to learn from - The opportunity to build something big and exciting at the frontier of applied AI Location & Employment Type - Remote, LATAM - Long-term independent contractor - Significant overlap with US Eastern Time (ET) required