Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA (5 days/week in-office when not traveling)

Compensation: $160,000 – $200,000 Base + Competitive Equity

Travel: Approximately 25% domestic travel to customer sites

Visa Sponsorship: Not Available

Reports To: Founding Team / Head of Engineering

We're looking for a highly technical, customer-obsessed Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to own the technical side of enterprise deployments from initial discovery through production rollout.

This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy solving real-world problems, working directly with customers, and turning complex AI systems into measurable business outcomes. You'll combine software engineering, implementation, solution design, and customer engagement to ensure successful deployments across large-scale logistics operations.

You'll thrive here if you're equally comfortable writing production code, troubleshooting integrations, leading customer workshops, and navigating ambiguous environments without a predefined playbook.

What You'll Do

Customer Discovery & Solution Design

• Lead technical discovery sessions with prospective and existing customers.
• Deeply understand operational workflows, pain points, and business objectives.
• Design proof-of-concepts (POCs) and customized demonstrations aligned to customer use cases.
• Translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.

Forward Deployment & Implementation

• Travel on-site to customer locations and embed with operations teams.
• Scope, build, and execute pilot programs with clearly defined success metrics.
• Configure workflows, map customer data, and implement integrations.
• Build APIs, webhooks, ETL pipelines, and custom tooling required to unblock deployments.
• Drive successful go-live launches and production rollouts.

Engineering & Product Collaboration

• Develop and ship customer-facing features into production.
• Deploy and optimize AI-powered workflows and agentic systems.
• Partner closely with product and engineering teams to prioritize customer-driven enhancements.
• Surface edge cases, integration challenges, and operational insights that influence the product roadmap.

Customer Success & Growth

• Define and track deployment success metrics such as:
• Call resolution rate
• Time savings
• Process automation rates
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
• Operational ROI
• Build ROI models and business cases for enterprise customers.
• Develop trusted relationships with director-level and executive stakeholders.
• Identify opportunities for expansion and additional product adoption.

Required Qualifications

• 2–5 years of professional full-stack software engineering experience.
• Experience building and shipping production software end-to-end.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript .
• Experience working with:
• APIs
• Webhooks
• System architecture
• Databases and SQL
• Cloud infrastructure
• Strong customer-facing experience in roles such as:
• Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) / Implementation Engineer / Product Engineer / Solutions-focused Software Engineer
• Demonstrated ability to work independently and solve ambiguous problems.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to engage technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Willingness to travel domestically and work directly with customer operations teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience at a recognizable startup (early-stage or high-growth preferred) or a major technology company.
• Background deploying AI/ML systems, LLM applications, or agentic AI workflows.
• Experience managing AI-native systems, agent orchestration, loop management, or coding-agent workflows.
• Experience integrating complex operational systems into production environments.
• Familiarity with logistics, trucking, transportation management, fleet operations, or supply chain technology.
• Experience building ROI frameworks and measuring operational impact.
• Previous experience as:

Software Engineer → Forward Deployed Engineer

Software Engineer → Product Manager

Software Engineer → Founder

• Early-stage startup engineer
• Technical founder