Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer - Phaseshift

Level: Mid to senior

Location: [Remote; expect travel to customer sites]

Compensation: $100,000 with equity

Employment: Contract to Hire

About Phaseshift

Phaseshift is building the data infrastructure for industrial operators in energy and other heavy-asset industries. We take high-frequency telemetry off real equipment, batteries, solar, data center power systems, manufacturing lines, anything with a controller and a sensor, and turn it into something

operators can run their business on: unified data, alarm triage, root-cause analysis, and AI agents that work on top of all of it.

Our customers are the people who operate these assets: owners, operators, and operations centers running mixed fleets from many different vendors. They have the problem. Most of them do not have the engineering team to solve it. That is where you come in.

We're a small team shipping into production with named customers, and we move fast because our customers do.

The role

This is not an SRE role, and it is not a sales engineering role. It is a product and backend engineering role pointed at the customer.

You will be the engineer who sits closest to the people using Phaseshift. You will spend real time inside their operations, learn how they actually run their assets, figure out what they need (which is often not what they first ask for), and then build it. Sometimes that is a feature in the core

platform. Sometimes it is an integration, a workflow, or an application built on top of our APIs that runs on Phaseshift and solves a problem a customer has today.

Our customers know their problem. They usually do not know what software they want. A big part of this job is closing that gap: showing them what is possible, building the first version with them, and getting it into daily use. The platform is API-first, so the thing you build for one customer is often the thing we ship to all of them a quarter later.

You will also become the person who demos the platform and runs technical onboarding, so the founders can spend their time on the business. Today the CTO does all of this. That does not scale, and you are the fix.

What you'll do

• Embed with customers. Sit with operators and asset managers, map how they work, and turn vague requests into clear problem statements with a measurable outcome.
• Build. Ship production Go in a distributed-systems codebase, and build applications and integrations on top of the platform's APIs and AI interfaces. You own what you ship from first line of code through production.
• Onboard and demo. Run technical demos, pilots, and onboarding. Make sure customers understand how to actually use the platform, not just that it is installed.
• Translate. Bring what you learn in the field back as product direction: what to build, what to cut, what every customer keeps asking for. You are the shortest feedback loop we have.
• Productize. When you solve something for one customer, decide whether it belongs in the core product, and if it does, make it so. Custom work that does not compound is the trap we are hiring you to avoid.
• Work the AI-forward way. We build with agents and AI-assisted development as first-class tools: epics broken into sprints, tasks handed to agents, tested before a PR is opened. You will use this, improve it, and help customers build on the same foundation.

What you won't do

• Harden infrastructure, run on-call for the platform, or own deployment automation. We have an SRE who does that, and does it well. You will work alongside that function, not inside it.
• Everyone here sells. You will not carry a quota, but you will be the person sitting with the customer every week, and the trust you build and the problems you solve are what turn a pilot into a fleet-wide contract and a customer into a reference.

Who you are

We hire on judgment more than years. You're probably a fit if you:

• Are a strong backend engineer first. You write clean, tested Go (or can get there fast from another systems language), and you are comfortable with services, message brokers, retries, timeouts, and what happens when the other side is down.
• Have product sense. You can look at a messy workflow and see the small thing that would change it, and you would rather ship that than write a spec about it.
• Like being in front of customers. You can explain a technical constraint to a plant manager and a business constraint to an engineer, and you are curious about how their operation makes money.
• Take ownership. When something is broken or missing for a customer, you fix it, whether or not it is "your" area. You treat the customer's workflow as your product.
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and friction. You will often be the only Phaseshift engineer in the room. You push back when you disagree, and you commit when the decision is made.
• Are curious about the physical world. You don't need an energy or industrial background; you do need to want to learn how the equipment our customers run actually behaves, whether that is a battery, an inverter, a chiller, or a PLC.

Nice-to-haves

Energy, utilities, data centers, manufacturing, or industrial controls experience. Time series data. Edge or on-prem deployments. Building on or with LLM tooling (MCP servers, agents, AI-assisted dev workflows). Prior experience in a customer-facing engineering role at a startup. Prior experience at an EMS, SCADA, or monitoring vendor is a strong plus.

How we work

Small team, short feedback loops, no committees. You'll ship in your first week and be in front of a customer in your first month. We read each other's work, we write tests, we move fast, and we don't paper over breakage. Expect a lot of autonomy, a bit of travel, and the kind of ambiguity that comes with being the first person in a role.

How we'll measure success

• Customers who were onboarded by you are using the platform daily, not just running it.
• Demos and technical onboarding no longer require a founder in the room.
• Things you built for one customer are now in the core product and in use
• by others.
• Product direction is visibly shaped by what you brought back from the field.