Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

Forward Deployed Engineer | New York, San Francisco or Toronto | $185K–$240K base + equity

This is a Palantir-style Forward Deployed Engineer mandate at a company where your work compounds across an entire portfolio. You will not be writing decks or shipping throwaway demos. You will embed directly inside real operating companies, ship agentic systems into live operations, and own the outcomes end to end. In practice you are operating as a fractional CTO across several businesses at once, with the scope and autonomy that implies. What you build for one business can ship to every business in the same vertical, so the leverage is enormous and it starts on day one.

We've partnered with a fast-growing software holding company that is rewriting how vertical market software gets built, scaled and held for the long term. They are profitable, they own more than thirty-five companies across construction, warehousing, SaaS and beyond, the most recent acquired at $20M ARR, and they are still buying. The thesis is simple: buy great software businesses and compound their growth through agentic software rather than headcount.

They have just closed a $250M Series B backed by an exceptional roster: General Catalyst, D1 Capital, CPMG, and the family offices of several of technology's most successful founders. Founded by operators who scaled a category-defining consumer marketplace and invested at a top-tier venture firm, the team runs on permanent, committed capital, so there is no exit clock. Compensation sits above the typical range for this experience band, with competitive equity on top.

The Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will:

Embed with portfolio companies to learn their operating model, earn operator trust, and pinpoint the two or three highest-leverage workflows ripe for agentic software.

Ship the wedge: build the integrations, prompts, evals and UI surfaces needed to land the first agentic loop at each company on the core platform.

Operate and tune deployed systems after launch, adjusting autonomy tiers and handing off cleanly to portfolio operations once they are stable.

Serve as the technical face to portfolio company GMs, setting expectations and making sure the system is understood as their leverage.

Bring patterns back to HQ and codify them into reusable playbooks that accelerate every future deployment in the vertical.

About You

You have at least twelve months in your current role. This one is firm.

You have shipped production LLM and agentic software, real systems with evals, autonomy gating and outcome tracking, not prototypes.

You are a full-stack engineer who can own delivery solo: TypeScript or Python on the backend, React on the frontend, and fluent in SQL. Go is a bonus.

You have three to six years behind you with genuine progression rather than short, scattered stints.

You have operator instincts: you can read a P&L, translate a business problem into a technical wedge, and win the trust of non-technical stakeholders quickly.

One of these backgrounds fits you: a Palantir or comparable Forward Deployed Engineer, a founding engineer or founder at an early-stage company, or an embedded deploy-and-operate engineer at a high-growth, venture-backed startup.

You want breadth. This is not the role for someone who wants to go deep on one system at a single large company.

Nice to have: a track record at a well-known technology company or a fast-scaling startup.

Location

You are based in New York, San Francisco or Toronto. The role is largely remote, but you need to be able to get into the office when it matters and travel out to portfolio companies as the work requires.

The team is moving quickly with this hire. If you want to ship agentic software into live operations and own the outcomes across an entire portfolio, apply now or send your CV directly to will@inventurerecruitment.com. When you get in touch, tell us in two lines about an agent you shipped and how you knew it was getting better.