Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Founding Forward-Deployed Engineer (Technical)

Burlingame / San Francisco Bay Area On-site
$160K$245K meaningful equity
15 years experience Founding engineering team

Our client is looking for a technical Forward-Deployed Engineer to join the founding team.

This is not a pre-sales role. You wont spend your time configuring someone elses platform or handing requirements to another engineering team. Youll talk to customers write code build integrations deploy AI systems and own problems from start to finish.

What youll build

Youll work directly with customers to solve messy high-impact problems involving:

• AI agents LLMs & RAG
• APIs webhooks & production integrations
• ETL & messy enterprise data
• ERP CMMS ServiceNow SAP & other enterprise systems
• Production workflows that customers actually depend on

Youll move quickly from:

Customer problem prototype production iteration

What were looking for

You have 15 years of hands-on experience in FDE Solutions Engineering Implementation Engineering Customer Engineering or a similar technical role.

You should be able to demonstrate:

• Strong software engineering and production coding
• Experience shipping customer-facing integrations
• APIs webhooks ETL or data pipelines
• Hands-on experience building RAG LLM AI-agent or agentic systems
• Direct customer/stakeholder interaction
• Comfort operating with ambiguity and significant ownership
• Startup or founding-engineer experience is a major plus.

Who this isnt for

Pure SWE with no customer exposure
Pre-sales-only Solutions Engineers
Non-coding consultants
Platform-config-only engineers
Candidates whose FDE title doesnt reflect actual deployment work

We care about what youve built and shipped not just whats written in your title.

Why join

Youll be one of our first engineers working directly with the two co-founders.

Youll have unusual ownership over:

• Product direction
• Technical architecture
• Customer deployments
• AI systems
• Engineering practices

This is a high-intensity high-ownership environment. If you like being close to customers building from scratch and seeing your code solve real problems immediately this is the kind of role where you can have outsized impact.

Compensation & location

$160K$245K base equity

Fully on-site in the SF Bay Area. The team will initially be based in Burlingame before moving to a San Francisco office.

Visa support is available for eligible candidates already in the U.S. including O-1 TN E-3 H-1B1 H-1B transfers/change of status F-1 OPT and STEM OPT.

Interview process

Founder conversation technical evaluation customer role-play messy-data exercise on-site

If youve built software for real customersnot just demosId love to hear from you.

For sourcing Id use the bolded phrases in this post as your Boolean keywords. In particular customer-facing integrations RAG AI agents ETL SAP ServiceNow and production coding will help you find the hidden FDE/implementation candidates who dont have Forward-Deployed Engineer in their title.