AI Black Belt / Forward Deployed Engineer || Contract || Texas

Job Description

About the Role

AI Black Belt is a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) at Zayo who works at the intersection of AI engineering and business problem-solving. FDEs embed directly within a business domain and develop AI solutions aligned with real workflows, data, and constraints until the capability is live and adopted.

At Zayo, the FDE is the person who closes the gap between an approved AI use case and a working product in the hands of the business.

This role will work under the direction of a Black Belt Lead and operate within Zayo's AI Reference Architecture and are expected to build fast, adapt fast, and leave behind reusable assets that accelerate the next use case.

Responsibilities

• Embed with business domains for 4 12-week AI use case builds.
• Translate business workflows, pain points, and goals into production-ready AI solutions.
• Lead discovery with SMEs, data owners, IT, security, and other stakeholders.
• Define scope, success metrics, risks, dependencies, and delivery milestones.
• Build AI agents, copilots, automations, retrieval flows, prompts, and integrations using Zayo s approved platform stack.
• Own delivery from solution design through production deployment and handoff.
• Connect AI solutions to approved enterprise systems, data sources, APIs, knowledge bases, and workflow tools.
• Validate outputs with SMEs, iterate quickly, and confirm business value.
• Identify, document, and escalate data gaps, integration issues, access constraints, and governance blockers.
• Ensure compliance with Zayo AI governance standards, including security review, CMDB registration, access controls, and human-in-the-loop requirements.
• Document architecture, data flows, workflows, prompts, controls, limitations, testing, and support requirements.
• Coordinate with IT, security, data, and platform teams to unblock delivery and prepare for production.
• Develop adoption plans, user onboarding materials, training support, and feedback loops.
• Hand off completed solutions with runbooks, support expectations, and operational ownership.
• Register reusable assets in the AI COE library, including templates, prompts, workflows, controls, or integration patterns.
• Maintain AI Black Belt certification as Zayo s platform stack, governance standards, and delivery practices evolve.
• Share lessons learned and reusable delivery patterns with the AI COE to improve scale and repeatability.

Qualifications

Technical

8+ years in software engineering, data engineering, or AI development.

Hands-on experience building and deploying agentic AI systems in production not just fine-tuning models or writing prompts.

Proficiency in at least one agent framework: Orkes, LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, or equivalent.

Comfortable with MCP (Model Context Protocol) tool development or able to get there fast.

Experience integrating with enterprise systems Salesforce, ServiceNow, Oracle, or similar .

Working knowledge of BigQuery or Snowflake for data querying and semantic layer interaction.

Ability to build a working, deployed AI product end to end within 3 days this is the Black Belt qualification test and the FDE bar.

Non-Tech

You prefer to be in the room with the business, not behind a Jira board.

You are comfortable with ambiguity requirements will change, data will be messier than expected, timelines will compress.

You escalate blockers fast and in writing no verbal-only agreements.

You leave things better than you found them documentation, reusable assets, clean handovers.

You do not need a 6-month project plan to get started.

Qualification Tiers

Every FDE at Zayo must complete the AI Black Belt curriculum before being deployed on a live use case.