Forward Deployed Engineer

About Wander

Wander is revolutionizing the $100 B+ short-term rental industry. We curate every aspect of the guest experience-from our smart homes to our intuitive booking platform. Our mission is to help people find their happy place, and our vision is to create the infrastructure for people to experience the world.

Backed by top-tier investors and led by experienced startup veterans, we're a tight-knit, remote-first team united by our passion for travel, technology, and creating unforgettable experiences.

Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

Role Overview

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you are the person we send when a customer is stuck and the answer lives somewhere across the whole stack. You parachute into a blocked or broken onboarding, diagnose it across PMS connectors, sync, and data mapping, fix it, ship the fix, verify it in production, and report back, often inside the same day. You also take what you learned and feed it back into the product so the next customer does not hit the same wall.

This is not a sales engineering role and it is not a support-ticket role. It is an engineering role pointed at the customer. The pitch that wins our deals (live in weeks, risk-free, no contract) is only as good as our ability to actually get a new operator live, and right now activation is the constraint on growth. Operators agree to integrate and then hit a manual step, an incomplete sync path, or a data-mapping edge case that stalls the launch. You are the person who makes those launches happen and keeps existing customers from churning when something breaks. Find it, solve it.

What You'll Do

• Get blocked customers live. Own the hard onboardings end to end: an operator on Streamline, Hostaway, Guesty, or Escapia who needs their units synced and live, not uploaded by hand. Diagnose where the sync or mapping is failing for their specific configuration and resolve it.
• Firefight across the stack. When a live customer's data is wrong, a sync is failing, or a launch is stalled, dive in, find the root cause wherever it is (connector behavior, sync state, our platform, the PMS itself), fix it, deploy, and confirm it's actually resolved.
• Close the loop with engineering. Turn what you find in the field into durable fixes and product input. A recurring onboarding failure is a bug to file and a connector gap to flag, not a thing to hand-hold around forever. You make the manual workaround unnecessary.
• Be the technical face for the customer in the moment. Work directly with operators and with our AM/onboarding team to unblock them, explain what's happening, and get them to value fast.
• Reduce churn at the technical root. Many retention risks are really unresolved technical friction. You handle the ones that are, and you surface the patterns so we fix them at the source.

What Success Looks Like

We will measure this role directly, and the metrics are simple:

• Units launched per month and time-to-go-live for customers you own. The job is to make both move in the right direction.
• Churn saved on accounts where the risk was technical, and a shrinking count of customers stuck in onboarding limbo.
• Recurring onboarding failures eliminated , not just worked around. Over time, the manual paths you're rescuing customers from should disappear because the underlying gaps got fixed.

Technical Profile

Required

• Generalist range with real depth. You can read and modify backend code (Python, Go, Node.js/TypeScript, or similar), reason about APIs and data models, and debug across service boundaries. You are comfortable not knowing the answer yet and finding it fast.
• Integration instinct. You understand the realities of third-party API integration: divergent data models, rate limits, webhook quirks, undocumented behavior, schema drift. You expect systems to disagree and you know how to reconcile them.
• Production debugging. Hands-on experience diagnosing live issues across distributed systems, reading logs and traces, and shipping fixes safely under time pressure.
• Customer-facing composure. You can sit in front of a frustrated operator, hold the technical thread, and get them unblocked without losing either the customer or the engineering rigor.

Valued

• Experience in vacation rental, PMS, channel management, or similar multi-system integration domains.
• Familiarity with the specific PMSes in our stack (Streamline, Hostaway, Guesty, Escapia, and others).
• A bias toward fixing the system so the fire doesn't recur, rather than getting good at putting out the same fire repeatedly.

Who This Is For

You like being thrown at problems with no clean owner and a customer waiting. You'd rather diagnose and ship than file and escalate. You get satisfaction from a customer going live because you personally cleared the path, and from knowing that the gap you found today won't stall the next ten operators because you closed it at the source. Equal parts engineer and firefighter, pointed at the customer.

Where Will You Work

We have a lovely office in Austin, TX equipped with a gong and energetic team members.