Forward Deployed Engineer

Offices in New York, Boston, and Tel Aviv

About Ark

Ark is an AI deployment company building superabundance in knowledge services, starting with retirement and insurance. We partner with traditional U.S. regulated financial services businesses and rebuild their backends with our agentic harness, enabling them to deliver higher quality services at a fraction of the cost. We pair our harness with a bespoke implementation process driven by our team of Forward Deployed Engineers who embed in our Partners’ businesses and work with them to deliver real outcomes.

Since founding the company in April, we closed >$1M in contracts and a $13M seed round from top-tier funds, with participation from founders and leaders at Datadog, CyberArk, Wix, Base44, Human Interest, Berkshire Partners, Fidelity, Susquehanna, Adobe, A24, Cursor, Scale AI and more.

About the Role

The Forward Deployed Engineer is the link between the product and the customer, combining strategy and technology to deliver a top-tier product and amaze the customer. You will embed in a Partner’s business, learn how their operation actually runs, and build and ship the software that runs it - working directly with the people whose day-to-day work you are changing.

Role and Responsibilities

• Embed with a Partner’s operations team. Sit with the people doing the work today, document the real process rather than the documented one, and translate what you learn into product decisions.
• Learn the regulatory domain to a working professional standard. Our software encodes statute and regulation; approximate correctness is not acceptable, and you will be expected to know why a rule exists, not only how to implement it.
• Integrate with systems that were not designed to be integrated with - vendor portals without APIs, SFTP file transfers, screen-driven legacy applications, PDF source documents, and manually maintained spreadsheets.
• Build and ship production code end to end: interfaces to every external system, tested implementations, scheduled jobs released behind feature flags, and a deliberate live rehearsal before anything runs against a Partner’s real data.
• Own correctness and operational risk in a multi-tenant system that holds payroll and personally identifiable information. Consider tenant isolation, idempotency, and failure handling before merging, not after.
• Use agentic coding tools as a primary means of delivery, while remaining fully accountable for the quality, security, and correctness of everything that ships.
• Communicate directly with Partner stakeholders, up to and including executives - reporting status, presenting tradeoffs, and building confidence in the work.

Requirements

• Substantial experience building and operating production software, with clear ownership of systems that other people depended on.
• Experience with agentic coding tools such as Claude Code or Cursor, and a considered view of where they accelerate delivery and where they require close supervision.
• Strong professional software engineering practice: Git-based workflows, code review as both author and reviewer, automated testing, CI/CD, monitoring, and safe production release practices.
• Demonstrated experience integrating third-party and legacy systems, including undocumented ones, without a sandbox or vendor support.
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English. You can write a clear status update, run a working session with non-technical operators, and hold your own in a meeting with a Partner’s leadership.
• Ability to produce client-quality deliverables - structured documents, process maps, and presentations - and to present them to a business audience.
• Strong analytical and problem structuring skills: you can take an ambiguous business problem, break it down, and drive it to a decision without a fully specified brief.
• Comfort with travel to Partner sites and with working across U.S. and Israel time zones.
• Comfort operating the infrastructure a production service runs on: relational databases such as PostgreSQL, asynchronous and scheduled job processing, handling of PII and secrets, and cloud platforms.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a client-facing engineering, consulting, or solutions role (forward deployed engineering, professional services, technical consulting).
• Background in a regulated industry — retirement, insurance, banking, or healthcare.
• Experience building with LLMs in production, including evaluation and guardrails.