Role Description
Why This Role -----------------
Concourse is building the operating system for State and Local governments. Our platform is a configurable approach to tackling fragmented government data and workflows, turning them into smooth operations for public servants and the constituents they serve. Every product we ship (e.g., school-district IT helpdesk, city-wide ERP, county-wide bail management system) is configured and customized by a Forward-Deployed team, ensuring the final-mile delivery of our software is relevant to our customers’ workflows.
You're the technical horsepower to a forward deployed PM paired with you on every project. That means rolling up your sleeves on the data models, workflows, and components (built as reusable scaffolding instead of a one-off), while the PM leans into customer solutioning alongside you. You’re extending and hardening our platform’s scaffolding against a new customer's specific requirements.
Our platform engineers hand you the connectors, workflow engine, and low-level primitives that everything is built on. You sit in the layer above that, building and continuously improving the product-type scaffolding that every FDPM you work with will reuse.
Government workflows are messy and legacy systems fight you at every turn. What you build here compounds.
What You'll Do ------------------
- Pair with an FDPM on every project for a given product category, from the first build through every deployment after it
- On a new product type, design and build the components, data models, and workflows as reusable scaffolding
- On later deployments of a product type, extend and harden that scaffolding against each new customer's specific data and edge cases, while the FDPM handles configuration and finishing touches
- Get your hands dirty with real government data: legacy exports, mainframe extracts, undocumented APIs, and the inevitable exceptions that come with it
- Use AI coding tools to build and iterate quickly, shipping working modules against a live customer instead of a backlog
- Feed what you learn about the platform's gaps back to the Platform Engineering team so the lower-level primitives improve with every product category you build
What We're Looking For --------------------------
- A portfolio: what have you built end-to-end, from scratch, under pressure?
- Strong backend fluency, with good instincts for abstraction: knowing what to generalize into reusable scaffolding vs. what to leave specific to one customer
- Enough frontend ability to build and ship a usable UI without needing to hand it off
- Hands-on experience using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Factory, etc.) as a core part of your daily workflow
- Comfort working directly with non-technical stakeholders alongside an FDPM, even if you're not the one owning the relationship
- High-agency, high-velocity mindset: comfortable being the first engineer into a brand-new product category, and just as comfortable staying paired in on every deployment after it
- US citizen (required for government work)
- Willing to work in-person in Flatiron, NYC (5 days/week)
Nice to have: experience building internal tooling, developer platforms, or reusable component libraries; prior startup experience shipping directly to customers; public sector domain knowledge (courts, permitting, utilities, school districts); or experience working with legacy/mainframe data.
About Concourse -------------------
Concourse is an early-stage startup with significant, accelerating revenue building AI-native software for state and local governments. This is the CEO's second venture after a successful exit.
The government software market is enormous ($100B+), almost entirely unmodernized, and structurally underserved. Existing vendors built for Fortune 500 companies. Palantir built for defense agencies with unlimited budgets. Nobody has built the right platform for the thousands of state and local agencies running essential public services on systems older than the internet.
Our team members, bolstered by the latest in agentic engineering and modern software design, are fixing that. Our team is based in Flatiron, NYC.
Compensation Range: $140K - $190K
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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