Role Description
About the Company
Our client is a seed-stage AI company in San Francisco that deploys AI agents into the real operational workflows of Fortune 500 enterprises. The team is a high-bar mix of operators, engineers, and strategists, working AI-natively with no layers or process overhead.
About the Role
Forward Deployed Engineers are client-facing builders. They take an AI agent from the first client conversation to production, then move to a new enterprise and a new problem every few months. Customer-facing work and hands-on technical work are both heavy parts of the job: sitting in discovery calls, gathering requirements and mapping processes, then building POCs and shipping them. This is not a pure engineering, strategy, or research role; it sits between building a demo and running agents inside a Fortune 500 team.
The role involves 20–40% travel to client sites. The team currently works 10am to 8pm, Monday to Friday, and is likely to move to Monday to Saturday.
What You'll Do
- Embed with client teams (finance, legal, ops, HR, IT) and map how work really runs, including exceptions and workarounds
- Turn ambiguous business problems into agent workflows with success criteria, guardrails, and evals
- Build prototypes and working agents, then drive adoption by training and sitting with end users
- Present findings and results directly to C-suite stakeholders
- Co-create KPIs with client leadership and measure the uplift after deployment
Key Details
- Location: San Francisco, CA (in-person, with 20–40% travel to client sites)
- Schedule: 10am–8pm, Monday to Friday (likely moving to Monday to Saturday)
- Employment: Full-time
- Experience: 2+ years
- Salary: $160,000 – $230,000 USD per year, plus equity
- Visa Sponsorship: Available (H-1B)
Benefits & Perks
- Work with Fortune 500 companies on real operational workflows
- Direct access to C-suite executives and operators
- Own the full loop from problem discovery to production deployment
- High-bar team of operators, engineers, and strategists
- Value creation in days rather than quarters
- Meaningful equity at an early stage
- AI-native way of working
- No layers or process overhead
- Shape product, playbooks, and company scaling
Interview Process
- Screen
- Vibe check
- Technical screen
- Case study
- Sales interview
- Onsite
- Offer
Required Candidate Questions
Please include the following with your application:
Basic Information
- LinkedIn profile
Experience
- GitHub profile
- Current company
- Current title
Logistics
- Location
- Do you need sponsorship now or in the future?
- Are you open to relocating to the Bay Area?
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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