Role Description
About the Role
This is a founding, first-non-founder hire at a seed-stage AI SaaS startup building conversational agents that run automated product demos for B2B go-to-market teams. You'll own every customer relationship and build the playbook for scaling from a small initial customer base to thousands. The role sits at the intersection of technical implementation, customer success, and product feedback — working directly with the CTO to shape what gets built.
What You'll Do
- Own end-to-end customer relationships from onboarding through ongoing success, including improving demo performance and driving adoption
- Teach and coach AI agents on product positioning, buyer personas, pricing conversations, and sales workflows
- Serve as the voice of the customer — analyze conversation logs and feedback to identify patterns and surface insights for the product team
- Translate customer feedback into actionable product feature requests in close collaboration with engineering and the CTO
- Build automation workflows and systems (scripting, APIs, low-code/no-code tools) to help the customer engineering function scale efficiently
- Define and document the customer engineering playbook from scratch
What We're Looking For
Required
- 0–3 years of experience in a customer-facing technical role in SaaS (e.g., solutions engineer, customer engineer, technical account manager)
- Strong written and verbal communication skills; comfortable leading product demos and customer onboarding sessions
- Hands-on experience building automation workflows to scale customer-facing tasks (scripting, APIs, or low-code/no-code tools)
- Experience analyzing customer feedback and conversation logs to identify patterns and inform product decisions
- Ability to work cross-functionally and translate customer needs into concrete product improvements
- Experience coaching or configuring AI agents for sales contexts — defining tiers, personas, and pricing conversations is a plus
Requirements & Eligibility
- Must be authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship
- Must be able to work on-site in San Francisco, CA
Compensation & Benefits
- Base salary: $140,000 – $185,000 USD annually
- Early employee equity opportunity at a funded, early-stage AI startup
Location
On-site in San Francisco, CA. Remote and hybrid arrangements are not available for this role.
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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