Role Description
You write production code and you're at your best in front of the customer. Automate real engineering work, from the shop floor to the eval.
A fast-growing seed-stage company in San Francisco automates white-collar work in engineering and life sciences, and sells the resulting RL environments to frontier AI labs. It already runs at an eight-figure revenue rate and is backed by angels from leading AI labs and private-equity firms. The team of six is growing to about fifteen by year end.
They're hiring 2 forward deployed engineers.
What you'll own
- Embedding with enterprise customers, for example alongside the engineers who do CAD modelling
- Building the automation, and the evals that prove it works on real data
- Deployment and rollout, and feeding the lessons back into a shared platform
- Customer calls on your own, plus upsells and new opportunities between projects
Must-haves
- You've worked as an FDE (an AI startup is ideal), or in an engineering role at a company that runs forward-deployed teams
- You write strong code and have put software into production, preferably while working directly with clients or as a consulting engineer
- Comfortable running a customer meeting alone, and proactive when a project is quiet
- At least 1 year of experience
- Working from the San Francisco office, 9-9-6
Bonus points
- AI agents, enterprise integrations or automating workflows for engineering or life-sciences clients
- Evals or tests for systems whose output is hard to verify
- A phase two or upsell you scoped yourself
What's in it for you
- $175k–$350k base, plus commission and 0.1–0.5% equity
- Real trust: you face customers without a founder in every meeting, paired with a project lead on each engagement
- Health cover, a gym, and a $1,000 monthly meal budget
Good to know
- Full-time, on-site in San Francisco, 9-9-6
- Visa options are limited: US citizens and green card holders, refugees or asylees, and H-1B, O-1 or TN holders can be considered, so please share your exact status
Process: profile review whiteboard session (1 hour) open-ended coding interview (1 hour) one day on-site* offer
When you apply, please include
- Your CV (PDF), your LinkedIn URL, and GitHub if you have one
- A customer deployment you owned: the situation before, what you built, and how it ran in production
- Your current location, and confirmation that on-site San Francisco works for you
- Your visa or citizenship status, and if you'll need sponsorship
- Your base salary expectation, your notice period, and any other interview processes you're in
Does this sound like you? Apply now. If you're a match, we'll be in touch within 3 working days.
RnB Consultancy | Netherlands | 3604 AB Maarssen | KvK 71489703
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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