Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

Founding Forward Deployed Engineer - AI / Private Markets

Location: New York City

Compensation: $200K–$300K total compensation, depending on experience

Company: Confidential Early-Stage AI Company

The Opportunity

My client is an early-stage AI company building technology for sophisticated financial services and private markets customers. They are looking for a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to sit at the intersection of customers, product, AI and engineering. This is a highly client-facing role. You will work directly with investment professionals and other senior stakeholders to understand complex workflows, identify where AI and automation can create meaningful value, and translate those problems into effective technical solutions.

The role is unusual in that it requires three things simultaneously:

Financial fluency. Technical aptitude. Exceptional customer presence.

You do not need to be a traditional software engineer, but you do need to be technically credible and comfortable working directly with modern AI and software systems. Equally, this is not a traditional sales, customer success or implementation position. You will be expected to understand a customer's business deeply, independently own important relationships, and help determine how technology should be applied to their problems.

What You'll Do

Own relationships and deployments with sophisticated financial services and private markets customers.

Work directly with investment professionals, operating teams and other senior stakeholders to understand their workflows and business problems.

Develop a deep understanding of how customers operate across areas such as sourcing, diligence, investment workflows and fund finance.

Translate ambiguous business problems into practical AI and software solutions.

Configure, prototype and help implement solutions using modern AI and software tooling.

Work closely with engineering and product teams to ensure solutions are technically sound and solve the right customer problem.

Identify opportunities to expand successful deployments and deepen customer relationships.

Recognize patterns across customers and feed those insights back into the product.

Help establish the playbook for a new, highly strategic function within an early-stage company.

What We're Looking For

We're deliberately open-minded on background. You could come from investment banking, private equity, financial services, consulting, enterprise technology, AI or a combination of these.

What matters is that you can operate credibly across both business and technology.

You will ideally have:

Experience working in or closely with financial services, ideally investment banking, private equity, private markets or adjacent environments.

A strong understanding of traditional finance and investment workflows.

The ability to communicate naturally and credibly with sophisticated investors and senior financial stakeholders.

Strong problem-solving and discovery skills — you can understand how a business operates rather than simply take requirements.

Technical fluency and a genuine interest in AI and software.

Comfort working with APIs, data, AI tools, automation or software systems.

The ability to quickly learn new technical concepts and work alongside engineers.

High ownership and the confidence to independently manage important customer relationships.

Excellent communication skills across both technical and non-technical audiences.

Comfort operating in a fast-moving startup without a fully established playbook.

Particularly Interesting Backgrounds

We'd be especially interested in hearing from people who combine backgrounds such as:

Investment Banking / Private Equity + technical education or strong technical aptitude

Computer Science / Engineering + investment banking or financial services

Technical consulting + private markets / financial services engagements

AI / technology consulting + sophisticated financial services customers

Forward Deployed Engineering / Deployment Strategy + financial services

Solutions Engineering / Technical Strategy + strong finance domain expertise

You do not need to fit neatly into one of these categories.

Technical Expectations

This role does not require you to be the strongest software engineer in the room.

However, you should be comfortable discussing how software and AI systems work and be capable of working with technical building blocks yourself.

Experience with some of the following is helpful:

Python

APIs and integrations

SQL and data workflows

LLMs and generative AI

AI agents / agentic workflows

Automation

Cloud platforms

Modern AI coding tools

We're much more interested in your ability to understand a problem, learn quickly and apply technology intelligently than whether you've used a particular framework.

What Success Looks Like

You should be someone my client can put in front of an important customer and trust to independently own the conversation. You'll be able to understand both the financial and technical sides of a problem, ask intelligent questions, earn the customer's trust, determine what actually needs to be solved, and work with the wider team to deliver the right solution. You'll also be joining early enough to have a significant influence on how this function develops as the company grows.

Why Join?

Join an early-stage AI company at a formative point in its growth.

Work directly with sophisticated private markets customers.

Operate at the intersection of AI, finance, product and customer strategy.

Take meaningful ownership rather than inheriting a narrowly defined role.

Help establish a function and playbook from the ground up.

Work closely with the company's founders and technical leadership.

Build deep expertise in how AI is being applied to real financial workflows.

If you've spent your career feeling caught between being too technical for a traditional finance or commercial role, but too commercially minded for a purely technical position, this could be an unusually good fit.