Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer

Location

Europe or US

Job posted

September 16, 2026

Type

Engineering

About us

We're building the next-generation web search engine for AI. Our infrastructure runs on clusters of 1,000+ machines, processing petabytes of data and powering large-scale retrieval for production AI workloads.

We've raised a top notch seed round from leading US and European investors. Our team is composed of the top 0.1% of talent in the field: PhD researchers and engineers from Amazon Alexa and leading research labs, ex-MBB consultants, and operators from venture-backed startups. We hire only people who can be the best in the world at what they do.

We're already in production with design-partner customers across enterprise search, AI research, and vertical AI applications. The opportunity is enormous. The bar is high. If you want to define a category, this is the place.

The role

We're hiring our first Forward Deployed Engineer. You sit between our customers and our core engineering team, and you own the path from "this team is evaluating us" to "this team is running us in production."

Getting a customer into production with a search and retrieval API is not a one-call job. There are several gates to pass: understanding the actual workflow, what data they need, in what format, how often it has to be refreshed, whether their agent even knows how to call a web search API. You run that process, you implement what can be implemented quickly, and you give a straight estimate on what cannot.

This is a first-class engineering role, not support. Our index is smaller than the incumbent's and we win on speed, accuracy and on how we treat the people who build on us. The quality and the speed of the loop between customer feedback and shipped code is one of the few things that actually separates us in this market, and it is yours to own.

You will work directly with our Head of Revenue on live opportunities and with our CTO on what makes it into the core codebase.

What you'll own

Customer implementations end to end. You lead technical evaluation, testing and production rollout for pilot customers. You are in the calls, you write the integration code, you debug it with them.

Feedback to shipped code. You analyse what prospects and pilot customers ask for, you implement what is feasible quickly, and you scope and estimate honestly what is not. Some requests need a small change, some need an architectural one, and you can tell the difference.

The technical discovery. What data do they need, at what freshness, in what shape, full pages or snippets, batch lookups or agentic queries. You get to the real workflow rather than the request as it was phrased.

The bridge back to core engineering. You bring back the patterns, not the anecdotes. What we keep hearing becomes roadmap input for the CTO and the core team, with evidence attached.

Product taste at the API surface. You know the product front to back and you have opinions about it. Where the API, the docs or the SDKs make people stumble, you fix it or you make sure it gets fixed.

Who you are

You have 5+ years of engineering experience and you have taken customers from evaluation to production yourself. Forward deployed, solutions architecture, or a product engineering role where you owned the customer outcome.

You can ship in someone else's codebase quickly. Our core is Rust. You do not need years of it, you need to get productive in it fast and know when a request is a two-day change and when it is a two-month one.

You are fluent with LLM applications and agents, and you can sit in a room with a CTO and a technical lead and hold the technical conversation without the call going sideways.

You actually like this work. Customer-facing engineering is a craft, and you want to be excellent at it rather than treating it as a step to somewhere else.

You are fast. A customer who tells us what they need on Monday should see something moving that week.

You operate well in ambiguity, with thin data and shifting priorities, and you make calls without complete information.

You are based in Europe or the US.

Bonus

Experience at a search, retrieval, vector database or data infrastructure company, on the customer-facing side.

You have built agents or LLM pipelines yourself, in production, not as a side project.

Experience with MCP, or with the integration surface of a developer API (SDKs, docs, sandboxes).

Background in information retrieval or enrichment and data-enrichment workflows.

What we offer

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. This is a founding-team hire and the equity reflects it.

Direct work with the founder and the CTO. No layers, no political theater.

Based in Europe or the US.

Comprehensive benefits package, including US health insurance, US 401k, flexible time off and more.

Seltz is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

Email your application View email address on careers.speedinvest.com