Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
Clera
About the role
About the Role
Own customer deployments for an early-stage SaaS company, from understanding business goals and connecting to data through delivering a trusted system with measurable impact. The role brings together data engineering, applied AI, and customer success, while also building reusable tools and practices to improve future deployments.
What You'll Do
Partner with revenue and operations leaders to understand business objectives and identify valuable problems to solve.
Lead customer onboarding, scope data access, and map undocumented warehouse schemas to business concepts.
Interview customer data and business teams to reconcile conflicting definitions and validate the resulting ontology.
Build customer-facing signals and workflows, including custom agent configurations, and troubleshoot their outputs.
Agree on success measures, analyze results, and build a credible evidence-based case for customer impact.
Develop reusable validation frameworks, evaluation harnesses, and mapping tools to accelerate deployments.
What We're Looking For
At least 3 years of experience in a technical, customer-facing role such as forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, or software engineering with substantial customer exposure.
Strong SQL and dbt skills, with deep familiarity navigating data warehouses and undocumented schemas.
A quantitative degree in statistics, mathematics, computer science, or a comparable field, plus a foundation in data science or machine learning.
Applied statistics and modeling experience, including distributions, seasonality, validation design, and calibration.
Experience creating custom agent setups beyond default implementations and building analytical cases tied to customer outcomes.
Ability to resolve inconsistent business definitions through interviews and data validation, with careful attention to detail and comfort working through ambiguity.
Founder experience or a non-traditional path into engineering is a plus.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary is $180,000 to $250,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in New York City, United States.
Responsibilities
- Partner with customer leaders to identify valuable problems and define business objectives.
- Lead customer onboarding, data access scoping, and mapping warehouse schemas to business concepts.
- Reconcile conflicting business definitions through interviews and data validation.
- Build customer-facing signals, workflows, and custom agent configurations, and troubleshoot their outputs.
- Define success measures, analyze results, and demonstrate customer impact.
- Develop reusable validation frameworks, evaluation harnesses, and mapping tools.
Qualifications
- At least 3 years of experience in a technical, customer-facing role such as forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, or software engineering with substantial customer exposure.
- Strong SQL and dbt skills, with deep familiarity navigating data warehouses and undocumented schemas.
- A quantitative degree in statistics, mathematics, computer science, or a comparable field, plus a foundation in data science or machine learning.
- Applied statistics and modeling experience, including distributions, seasonality, validation design, and calibration.
- Experience creating custom agent setups and building analytical cases tied to customer outcomes.
- Ability to resolve inconsistent business definitions through interviews and data validation, with attention to detail and comfort with ambiguity.
- Founder experience or a non-traditional path into engineering is a plus.
Skills mentioned
About Clera
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