Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Founding Forward-Deployed Engineer (Technical)

Burlingame / San Francisco Bay Area · On-site

$160K-$245K + meaningful equity

1-5 years experience · Founding engineering team

Our client is looking for a technical Forward-Deployed Engineer to join the founding team.

This is not a pre-sales role. You won't spend your time configuring someone else's platform or handing requirements to another engineering team. You'll talk to customers, write code, build integrations, deploy AI systems, and own problems from start to finish.

What you'll build

You'll work directly with customers to solve messy, high-impact problems involving:

• AI agents, LLMs & RAG
• APIs, webhooks & production integrations
• ETL & messy enterprise data
• ERP, CMMS, ServiceNow, SAP & other enterprise systems
• Production workflows that customers actually depend on

You'll move quickly from:

Customer problem → prototype → production → iteration

What we're looking for

You have 1-5 years of hands-on experience in FDE, Solutions Engineering, Implementation Engineering, Customer Engineering, or a similar technical role.

You should be able to demonstrate:

• Strong software engineering and production coding
• Experience shipping customer-facing integrations
• APIs, webhooks, ETL, or data pipelines
• Hands-on experience building RAG, LLM, AI-agent, or agentic systems
• Direct customer/stakeholder interaction
• Comfort operating with ambiguity and significant ownership
• Startup or founding-engineer experience is a major plus.

Who this isn't for

• Pure SWE with no customer exposure
• Pre-sales-only Solutions Engineers
• Non-coding consultants
• Platform-config-only engineers
• Candidates whose FDE title doesn't reflect actual deployment work

We care about what you've built and shipped , not just what's written in your title.

Why join?

You'll be one of our first engineers , working directly with the two co-founders.

You'll have unusual ownership over:

• Product direction
• Technical architecture
• Customer deployments
• AI systems
• Engineering practices

This is a high-intensity, high-ownership environment. If you like being close to customers, building from scratch, and seeing your code solve real problems immediately, this is the kind of role where you can have outsized impact.

Compensation & location

$160K-$245K base + equity

Fully on-site in the SF Bay Area . The team will initially be based in Burlingame before moving to a San Francisco office.

Visa support is available for eligible candidates already in the U.S., including O-1, TN, E-3, H-1B1, H-1B transfers/change of status, F-1 OPT and STEM OPT.

Interview process

Founder conversation → technical evaluation → customer role-play + messy-data exercise → on-site

If you've built software for real customers-not just demos- I'd love to hear from you.

For sourcing, I'd use the bolded phrases in this post as your Boolean keywords . In particular, "customer-facing integrations," "RAG," "AI agents," "ETL," "SAP," "ServiceNow," and "production coding" will help you find the hidden FDE/implementation candidates who don't have "Forward-Deployed Engineer" in their title.