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Bobyard

Forward Deployed Engineer

$120K - $150K San Francisco, CA, US Mid Posted May 30, 2026

Role Description

Position Overview

Forward Deployed Engineers at Bobyard work directly with our most strategic customers — general contractors — to solve critical problems end-to-end.

You’ll embed with customer teams, understand their workflows, and ship solutions directly in their environment. From prototype to production in days. The patterns you establish become core product features.

This role combines software engineering, product thinking, and customer partnership. High autonomy, high impact.

What You’ll Do

  • Embed & ship: Work directly in customer instances. Identify high-leverage problems. Build full-stack: React, Django, PostgreSQL. Ship in weeks, not quarters.
  • Own outcomes: Define ambiguous problems and deliver scalable solutions. Design systems that handle 10x usage.
  • Bridge product customer: Your field work informs roadmap. Convert one-off solutions into platform capabilities.
  • Full lifecycle: Discovery, system design, data modeling, infra, frontend, deployment, monitoring. You build it, run it, and scale it.
  • Ensure reliability: AWS / GCP. Deploy, monitor, debug. Ensure reliability.
  • Validate and scale: Prototype with real users. Measure impact. Invest in what works.

You Are

  • High-ownership: Comfortable with ambiguity. Create clarity and deliver.
  • Product-minded: Understand why we build. Strong product judgment. Partner effectively with design.
  • Technically strong: System design, performance, architecture. Experience scaling systems or learn quickly.
  • Full-stack: Frontend through infra. No handoffs. Accountable for outcomes.
  • Fast learner: Adopt new tools and ship.
  • Startup-focused: Prefer impact and speed over process. Comfortable with customer-facing work.
  • Reliable under pressure: Manage parallel priorities. Sequence work and deliver.

Details

Full-time, in-person San Francisco. We value learning rate and proven impact over pedigree. If you ship high-quality software that customers depend on, let’s talk.you.

Compensation Range: $120K - $150K

About Forward Deployed Engineering

Forward Deployed Engineers are embedded directly with customers to build custom solutions, integrate products into existing infrastructure, and bridge the gap between product engineering and customer success. The role combines deep technical skills with the ability to operate in client environments and translate business requirements into working software.

Originally pioneered by Palantir, the FDE model has spread across AI, enterprise SaaS, and cloud infrastructure companies. FDEs write production code, architect integrations, train customer teams, and feed product insights back to the core engineering organization. At companies like OpenAI, Salesforce, and Databricks, FDE teams are treated as elite engineering units that can ship custom solutions in days rather than quarters.

Typical FDE stack: Python, TypeScript, SQL, REST/GraphQL APIs, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), and increasingly LLM APIs and AI orchestration frameworks. Strong communication and the ability to context-switch between technical and business conversations are as important as coding ability.

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