Pulse Forward Deployed AI Engineer Indianapolis, IN · Full time Company website

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Pulse brings marketing, engineering, and AI under one roof for mid-market companies and nonprofits that need enterprise-grade solutions without Big Four fees. We solve the core problem every growing company faces: too many siloed consultants, each seeing only part of the picture. When the same team runs your paid ads, builds your AI workflows, and understands your CRM architecture, everything works better. We optimize for revenue and growth, not vanity metrics three layers removed from your bottom line. We're a fast-growing team built in Indiana with big ambitions to become the Midwest's top consulting and implementation company. You'll work on genuinely interesting problems across industries with real autonomy, building systems that matter for clients who depend on what you create.

Why this role exists

Funny thing we've noticed from everyone we've hired at Pulse the last couple of months (former Navy engineers, senior engineers at enterprise companies): it's refreshing to actually ship code that hits production.

At big enterprises, it's months of approvals, dev cycles, testing gauntlets, change management, and team restructures before anything goes live. One of our recent hires put it like this:

"On Mondays at my old job, I spent an hour in meetings with my team telling them what I was doing. An hour with stakeholders. Another hour with leadership. It was lunch before I could write a line of code."

That's not us. We hire engineers who want to ship fast with AI. If you're someone who can't stop building, can't stop talking about what just dropped from Anthropic or OpenAI, and you hate death-by-meeting culture, keep reading.

Who we are

Pulse is the Deloitte Digital for the non-Fortune 500 in the Midwest, except we actually build the things. We focus on two things, and only two things: AI implementation and transformation, and traditional software engineering powered by AI. Our clients are 50 to 200+ person companies in healthcare, financial services, nonprofits, and government contracting.

The work is real and shipped, not deck-ware:

• AI agents and chatbots in regulated industries (healthcare, finance, government)
• Intelligence platforms that ingest, structure, and act on messy business data
• Internal automation tools that compress thousands of hours of manual work
• Unified data layers stitching together fragmented systems of record
• End-to-end production and operations automation for ops-heavy businesses

We embed with clients, sit with their CEOs and COOs, and ship things that move their numbers. We don't hand over a slide deck and walk away.

What you'll do

• Embed into client engagements and own end-to-end delivery, from spec to production
• Use Claude Code and other agentic tools as a force multiplier on every project. Your output is what we measure.
• Build across the stack: backend services, agent architectures, integrations into whatever the client runs (Supabase, NetSuite, Azure, AWS, GCP, custom APIs, MCPs, legacy systems, all of it)
• Architect AI systems that are reliable, auditable, and keep humans in the loop where it matters (compliance, healthcare, finance, etc.)
• Talk to clients directly. You're not a ticket-taker hidden behind three PMs. You sit with the CTO or the COO and figure out what to build next.
• Ramp fast in unfamiliar codebases. Every engagement is different.

What we're looking for

• Backend chops. You've built and shipped production systems. You understand databases, queues, APIs, auth, and you can debug a nasty stack trace without panicking. Frontend is easy. We want people who've designed systems and are telling Claude Code how to implement.
• AI-native workflow. You don't just open Claude when you're stuck. You orchestrate it. You've got real opinions on context windows, prompting patterns, agent design, and what's actually production-ready vs. demo-ware.
• Speed without sloppiness. We ship fast, but we ship things that don't melt down at 2 AM.
• Bias for action. When you see a problem, you fix it. You don't ask how. You don't add it to a roadmap for Q3.
• Direct, authentic communication. You can explain tradeoffs to a non-technical CEO without making them feel dumb, and you can push back on a bad idea without being a jerk about it.

Bonus points

• You've built seriously with Claude Code (not just kicked the tires for a weekend)
• Experience in regulated industries (healthcare, financial services, government)
• Background somewhere bureaucracy was the enemy: defense, high-growth startups, scrappy ops teams
• You've shipped agent systems in production and have stories about what broke

What you won't do here

• Sit through three hours of status meetings every Monday
• Wait six weeks for a code review
• Watch your work die in a change management committee
• Babysit a single legacy system for two years
• Write specs for someone else to build

What we offer

• Competitive base salary, commensurate with experience
• Equity in Pulse
• Health, dental, vision
• PTO we actually want you to take
• A real desk in a real office with people who make you better
• Direct access to founders. Sean (CEO) and Jake (COO) are in the trenches with you, not behind a calendar wall.