Forward Deployed Engineer

We're building at the frontier of what applied AI can do inside real work — the operational core of an industry that moves the physical economy. One of the largest on earth, essential, and almost entirely untouched by modern AI. It still runs on people, spreadsheets, and software written before the internet.

We went vertical first on purpose. Vertical is where the hard problems live: messy inputs, real consequences for being wrong, decades of institutional knowledge nobody wrote down. Anything that works here has been tested against reality in a way horizontal tooling never is.

And it doesn't stay vertical. The systems we're building — how work gets decomposed, verified, corrected, and learned from — aren't specific to one industry. They're specific to work. The vertical is the proving ground. The reapplication is the company.

We're deliberately quiet about which industry until we talk. What we'll say now: it's enormous, it's overlooked, and the incumbents aren't coming. You'll get the full picture on the first call.

• A cap table most early-stage companies would envy. Raised at the top quartile of seed-stage rounds by size — 36+ months of runway — from the seed investors who were early in Palantir, Databricks, Anduril, GitLab, Retool, Lyft, Square, DoorDash, Superhuman, and Ironclad.

• Real traction, right now. Live in production with design partners, and the data flywheel is already turning. Demand isn't the bottleneck — execution is. The market is tens of thousands of enterprises, each worth seven figures a year.

• Founded by multi-time exited operators. The founding team has built and sold multiple software companies and spent years up close with dozens more. You're joining people who know how this is actually done — not learning it alongside them.

You're the engineer who goes where the work actually happens.

Every deployment lands in a real operation with its own data, its own exceptions, and its own way of doing things nobody documented. Getting from works in the demo to works here is engineering, not project management — and it's the difference between a design partner and a customer.

You sit with the people doing the job, watch what they actually do rather than what the process doc says, and then build. Sometimes that's configuration and data mapping. Sometimes it's writing the thing that doesn't exist yet. Then you carry what you learned back into core product, so the next deployment is easier than the last — and eventually the last mile stops being a mile.

Where this sits: the Customer Success Manager owns the relationship and the outcome. You own the technical reality underneath it. You'll work in tandem constantly, and you're the one writing code.

• You've deployed software inside someone else's operation. (Hard requirement.) Forward-deployed, solutions engineering, implementation, technical consulting — a title we don't care about, an experience we do. You've been in the building when a rollout was going badly and you're the one who turned it around.

• You write real code. Python and SQL at minimum, comfortable in unfamiliar systems and undocumented data. This is an engineering role with customer exposure, not a customer-facing role with technical flavor.

• You read a room and a workflow at the same time. You can tell when the stated process and the real process have diverged, and you're diplomatic about what that means.

• You have a strong instinct for what generalizes. Every customer wants a special case. Knowing which ones are genuinely special and which are the product telling you something is the judgment that makes this role compound instead of accumulating one-offs.

• Comfortable being the face of the company. When something breaks in front of a customer, you're the one standing there — steady, honest about what went wrong, specific about what happens next.

Python · SQL · FastAPI · PostgreSQL · AWS

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