Forward Deployed Engineer

Job Description
AI Talent Now Job # ZR 88

The first Forward Deployed Engineer in San Francisco

As our first Forward Deployed Engineer in San Francisco, you'll establish our US FDE presence and help define how this function operates from the ground up. The FDE team is still small and the playbook is still being written - you'll be instrumental in shaping the processes, tooling, and best practices that the function runs on as it scales.

You'll work directly with engineering leaders at the world's most AI-driven companies, understanding their unique architectures and crafting solutions that work for their specific needs. This role demands an unusual combination of deep technical expertise and entrepreneurial drive, you'll be writing high-performance code one day and presenting architectural decisions to VPs of Engineering the next.

Core Responsibilities

This role spans both customer work and engineering. You own each customer end-to-end - and do what's needed to make sure our company is transformational for them. This involves everything from changes to core product to owning the customer relationship:

• Architect and deploy at scale: Work with a customer to understand their full architecture, design implementation strategies that fit their systems, and pair with their engineers to deliver them.
• Evolve the core product to make the customer successful: This can range from debugging and fixing issues that are blocking the rollout (which often go deep into the core technology, such as the deterministic browser), to shipping features that will be transformative for the customer you're focused on, but also move the product forward itself e.g. rework parts to work at a new level of scale required by the customer.
• Own the technical relationship and lead the pilot: Be the technical lead to engineering leadership (VPs Eng, Staff+ engineers) at each customer - driving scoping, integration, and rollout. A founder or account executive handles pricing and contracts; the two of you operate as a pod per account.
• Guide the direction of the product based on what you learn in the field: As you see how the product performs, and how engineers' workflows are rapidly evolving, work out what do we need to build to unlock the next level of automating software development? Where there are improvements which make sense to own and ship, ship them; where the work is larger and needs deeper scoping pair with core engineering team to make them happen.
• Build the playbook: The FDE function is still being defined. You'll be instrumental in establishing the processes, tooling, and best practices that make each deployment smoother and faster than the last, creating the leverage that lets the team scale.

Requirements

Seniority

3 - 8 years of experience in a demanding technical engineering role, ideally involving customer-facing work

Work experience

At least one experience in a deeply technical/demanding role (e.g., founding engineer / ex-founder) at a high-growth startup

Strong experience in or interest in customer-facing technical work - integration, deployment, or pilot ownership with engineering teams (not just sales/demos)

Education

CS degree from a top university (Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Ivy League, Harvey Mudd, etc.)

If no CS degree, must demonstrate deep coding experience starting early (e.g. competitive programming, open source)

Hard skills

Can solve algorithmic/logic coding problems under pressure - this is where most candidates fail in the interview process

Experience navigating and debugging complex, unfamiliar codebases - browser internals, CI integration, web APIs

Built or scaled a greenfield product (e.g. 0 to 500K ARR) as a primary engineer

Miscellaneous

Based in San Francisco; able to work on-site 5 days/week but willing to spend first ~2 months in London for onboarding