Forward Deployed Engineer (Founding)

About the role

The chance to put AI agents to work on sticky problems in high-stakes environments, where AI has never previously lived.

A startup backed by the very best is growing faster than it can deliver. This is an opportunity to be the founding Forward Deployed Engineer, in a team that’s built to win. You’ll be writing the playbook everyone after you follows.

Our client builds AI agents for large, highly regulated enterprises. The product is landing fast and they need a founding Forward Deployed Engineer to own how customers get from first pilot to full production.

What You'll Be Doing

You'll own customer implementations end to end. From the first proof-of-value pilot to a live, expanding production deployment. Roughly half your week is in front of customers and half is in the code; you'll be moving between the two without dropping either.

On the pre-sales side, you'll run proof-of-value pilots: agree what success looks like up front with the customer, then prove it in their own environment, against their own systems and data. You'll be the reason a prospect becomes a paying contract.

On the post-sales side, you'll make deployed customers successful and then bigger - integrating the agents with their systems, driving real adoption inside their teams, and expanding a first foothold into a serious account.

You'll work directly with the customer's technical and operations people to understand messy, real-world workflows, then translate them into something the product can actually run. When something breaks or a requirement is ambiguous, you're the one who figures it out.

Because you're the first FDE, you'll set the standard - the playbook for how pilots are run, how deployments are shaped, and how the next FDEs the company hires will work.

What You'll Need

Essential:

You’ve worked inside a venture backed startup and know how to operate without a structured path in place

Hands-on engineering ability: comfortable in Python and working with REST / HTTP APIs, enough to integrate a product into a customer's systems yourself

Genuinely customer-facing - sociable, articulate, and at ease in a technical sales or deployment setting

Minimum of 2 years in a role that sits between engineering and the customer (FDE, Customer-Facing Software Engineer, Solution/Sales Engineering)

Willing to lean fully into AI tools in how you work

Bonus:

A consulting background paired with startup time, or an ex-founder / technical-generalist streak

A software engineer who's deliberately moving toward the customer-facing side

Worked in environments where security and compliance are core

Strong-school signal or standout internships (if you're on the lighter side of experience, real slope matters more than years)

The Person

You can gain a customer’s trust in a room, as an engineer. You’re technical enough to build and human enough to sell. You'd rather own an outcome than a ticket. You can hold a technical conversation and a commercial one in the same meeting, and you don't disappear when a deployment gets hard or a customer gets frustrated. You've shipped things that changed a business result.

The Role

Based in New York, in person, five days a week. Roughly 20% travel - expect a couple of customer on-sites a quarter.

This role needs existing US work authorization; established status (H-1B transfer, STEM OPT, TN for Canadians) can work, but the company isn't sponsoring new visas from scratch.