Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

SF Bay Area, CA · Hybrid · Full-time

Compensation: $180K–$230K base + competitive equity

About the Company

Our client is a seed-stage AI startup rebuilding B2B customer operations around long-running AI agents. Instead of the usual support chatbots or pre-sales tooling, they focus on the messy post-sale lifecycle — onboarding, adoption, QBRs, renewals, and churn — deploying agents that deliver high-touch service at scale. They are backed by well-known venture investors and already have enterprise customers running the product in production.

Founded 2025 · small founding team · Industry: AI, B2B, Enterprise

The Role

We are hiring a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to embed directly with enterprise customers and take our client's AI agents from scoping to production. You will own accounts end-to-end and feed everything you learn in the field back into the core product — the technical heartbeat of a fast-growing applied-AI team.

What you'll be doing

• Embed with customers to learn how they run onboarding, adoption, and renewals, then identify where the agents drive the most value
• Deploy and configure agents against real customer systems — connecting to data sources (warehouses, CRM, BigQuery), wiring up SSO and integrations, and getting agents into production
• Build evals against real customer data to prove agent quality, and iterate until they clear the bar
• Partner with the go-to-market team as the technical credibility in customer conversations, helping close, activate, and expand accounts
• Debug live deployments, run root-cause analysis, and improve the platform when it gets in the way
• Own the smallest end-to-end slice that proves value, then expand from there

Tech stack: Python, FastAPI, React, PostgreSQL, LLMs, RAG, BigQuery, CI/CD, agent frameworks

Requirements

• Roughly 2–7 years across full-stack software engineering and/or forward-deployed engineering
• Either a senior profile (about 5–7 years, with a couple of years each in software engineering and in a forward-deployed / customer-facing role at a strong company or startup) or a high-slope earlier-career profile (2–3 years with standout internships, an early promotion track, or founding-engineer experience at a venture-backed startup)
• A track record of shipping AI/LLM features end-to-end into production — real systems, not just prototypes
• Direct experience working inside customer environments (forward-deployed, solutions engineering, or similar)
• Strong Python on the backend (FastAPI) and React on the frontend
• A CS or Engineering degree, or equivalent skill proven by a history of shipping production systems
• Based in, or willing to relocate to, the SF Bay Area for hybrid work

Nice to Haves

• Experience building evals to measure and hill-climb LLM or agent quality
• Familiarity with agent frameworks, RAG, and connecting AI systems to customer data sources and warehouses
• Comfort partnering with go-to-market teams and being the technical voice in the room with customers

Why Join

• A founding role with broad ownership over product and infrastructure, and real architectural influence
• Fast feedback loops, strong promotion potential, and deep hands-on exposure to applied AI — voice agents, memory systems, knowledge graphs, and agentic workflows
• Competitive base plus meaningful equity at an early-stage, well-backed company with genuine enterprise traction

Details

• Location: SF Bay Area, CA
• Work policy: Hybrid
• Compensation: $180K–$230K + equity
• Visa sponsorship: Not available (US citizens / Green Card holders only)
• Employment type: Full-time