Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer
- Banking Platform

Ship it, then go sit with the people using it. - Charlotte, NC

Location: Charlotte, NC - on-site at our headquarters, with travel to partner and client sites.

Experience Required: 5+ years building and shipping production software, including meaningful time in financial services and hands-on experience building with Claude.

Employment Type: Full-time, exempt.

Reports To: Technical Program Manager.

Direct Reports: None. You work across engineering, product, operations, and directly with external partners.

Core Stack: React, Flutter, AWS, GitHub Actions, Claude (Claude Code and the Claude API).

Portfolio: Expected - see "Show Us Your Work" below.

The Trade We're Offering

We're a smaller institution headquartered in a city full of very large ones, and we're not going to pretend we can match what the largest of them offer on every dimension.

What we're offering instead is scope that those jobs structurally cannot give you. At a large bank, this work is split across four teams - a mobile team, a web team, a platform team, and a client-facing integration group - and you'd own a lane in one of them. Here, the whole path from commit to customer is yours. You'll write the Flutter code, write the React code, own the pipeline that ships both, and then sit across the table from the people using what you built and watch where it breaks. Engineers who want that loop rarely get it at scale. If that's the job you've been trying to find, this is it.

About the Role

We're hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to build our banking platform and then take it into the field. This is a hybrid of product engineering and client-facing solutions work: roughly two-thirds building, one-third embedded with the partners, vendors, and internal teams who depend on what you ship.

The forward-deployed part is the point. Most engineering organizations put layers between the person who writes the code and the person who has to live with it, and quality suffers in both directions. You'll close that gap. When an integration fails at a partner, you're the one who diagnoses it - not a support tier that escalates to a queue that eventually reaches engineering three days later.

We also expect this person to be genuinely fluent with Claude - not as a novelty, but as core tooling. A small team competing against institutions a hundred times our size only works if each engineer's output is multiplied. You should already be building this way and be able to show us how.

You'll work closely with the Senior Product Manager who owns the banking portfolio, and you'll have real influence over technical direction. We have opinions but not much legacy, which means your architectural decisions will still be standing in five years.

What You'll Own

Mobile Development — Flutter

• Build and ship our customer-facing mobile banking application in Flutter across iOS and Android.
• Own the release process end to end - store submissions, staged rollouts, versioning, and the deprecation strategy for older clients.
• Handle the parts of mobile banking that are genuinely hard: biometric authentication, secure local storage, session handling, offline states, and deep links from notifications.
• Keep performance and app size honest on the low-end devices real customers actually carry.

Web Development — React

• Build customer-facing web banking experiences and the internal tooling our operations teams use daily.
• Share logic and design language across web and mobile so the two products don't quietly diverge.
• Build to accessibility standards - WCAG conformance is a regulatory expectation in consumer banking, not a nice-to-have.

Cloud Infrastructure — AWS

• Design, deploy, and operate services on AWS - compute, storage, networking, secrets, and identity.
• Own infrastructure as code so environments are reproducible and auditable rather than hand-assembled.
• Build for the availability and recovery expectations of a regulated financial institution, and be able to prove them to an examiner.
• Watch the bill. Cloud cost discipline matters more at our size than it does at a bank that can absorb the waste.

Delivery Engineering — GitHub Actions

• Own the CI/CD pipelines for web, mobile, and backend services.
• Build automated testing, security scanning, dependency checks, and deployment gates into the pipeline.
• Maintain the change controls and audit trail that a regulated environment requires - approvals, artifacts, and release evidence.
• Make shipping boring. A deployment should be an ordinary Tuesday, not an event.

AI-Assisted Engineering — Claude

• Use Claude Code as a daily part of how you build - across the codebase, in your IDE, and wired into CI where it earns its place.
• Hands-on experience building AI-powered product features with the Claude API. You know how to identify high-value use cases (document processing, support workflows, fraud and dispute triage, and internal operations) and build them into reliable production systems.
• Set the standard for how this team uses AI - what gets automated, what stays human, what gets reviewed before it merges, and what never touches customer data.
• Write and maintain evaluations for anything AI-driven that reaches production. In banking, "it seemed to work" is not a release criterion.
• Define the guardrails alongside Risk and Compliance: what data can go to a model, how outputs are logged and reviewed, and how we prove any of it to an examiner.

Forward Deployment & Integration

• Embed directly with partners, vendors, and internal business teams to deploy, integrate, and troubleshoot in their environment.
• Own integrations with core banking platforms, payment rails, and fintech APIs - from design through production support.
• Translate partner needs into implementation plans, building what they actually need (not necessarily what or how they asked).
• Bring what you learn in the field back into the roadmap. You'll see the friction before anyone else does, and you're expected to say so.

Security, Risk & Compliance

• Treat security as a design constraint, not a review stage - encryption in transit and at rest, least privilege, secrets management, secure SDLC.
• Partner with Risk and Compliance on architecture decisions, vendor assessments, and audit response.
• Build systems that produce the evidence an examiner will eventually ask for, before they ask for it.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 5+ years building and shipping production software, with real ownership of what you shipped after it launched.
• Financial services experience. You understand why a banking release is not a social app release - the regulatory constraints, the audit expectations, the consequences of a bad deploy touching real money.
• Production React experience - modern hooks-based code, state management, and performance work.
• Production Flutter experience shipping to both app stores, or strong native mobile experience plus a credible case that you'll pick up Flutter fast.
• Hands-on AWS: you've architected, deployed, and operated services there, not just consumed them.
• CI/CD ownership with GitHub Actions or a close equivalent (GitLab CI, CircleCI, Jenkins) - you've built pipelines, not just used them.
• Deep, hands-on Claude experience. You use Claude Code as part of your normal workflow and you've built something real against the Claude API - not a weekend demo, but something with error handling, cost awareness, audit/observability capabilities, and a point of view about when the model should and shouldn't be trusted.
• Judgment about where AI helps and where it doesn't. We want the engineer who knows which problems to point a model at, and which ones to just write the code for.
• Client-facing ability. You can sit in a room with a partner's engineering team or a business stakeholder, absorb a vague problem, and leave with a clear scope.
• Exceptional attention to detail, communication, and documentation . You are precise in your work, clear and direct in how you communicate, and disciplined about documenting decisions, systems, and operational context - especially when working across engineering teams, clients, and partners.
• Comfort with ambiguity and thin process. You'll frequently be the person who decides how something gets done.

Nice to Have — Genuinely Optional

• Integration experience with core banking platforms (Fiserv, Jack Henry, FIS, Q2, Alkami, nCino) or payment rails (ACH, Zelle, RTP, FedNow, card networks).
• Fintech API work - Plaid, Marqeta, Stripe, Alloy, or similar.
• Backend depth in Node, Python, Go, Java, or Kotlin.
• Infrastructure as code (Terraform, CDK, CloudFormation) and containerization.
• Familiarity with regulatory frameworks touching engineering - SOC 2, PCI DSS, GLBA, FFIEC guidance.
• Agentic patterns beyond chat - tool use, MCP servers, multi-step workflows, or the Claude Agent SDK.
• Running Claude models through Amazon Bedrock, which fits neatly with the AWS stack here.
• Experience writing evals, or any rigorous approach to measuring whether an AI feature actually works.
• Prior consulting, solutions engineering, or forward-deployed work at a software vendor.

Domain Expertise We Value

• Mobile - Flutter, Dart, iOS & Android release management, biometric auth, secure storage
• Web - React, TypeScript, modern state management, WCAG accessibility
• Cloud - AWS compute, storage, networking, IAM, infrastructure as code
• Delivery - GitHub Actions, automated testing, security scanning, change control
• Integration - Core banking platforms, payment rails, fintech APIs, REST & webhooks
• AI Engineering - Claude Code, Claude API, tool use and MCP, evaluations, Amazon Bedrock
• Regulated Engineering - Secure SDLC, audit evidence, SOC 2 / PCI DSS / GLBA awareness

What We Can and Can't Offer

What You Get Here

• The full path from commit to customer, owned by one person
• Architectural decisions that will still be standing in five years
• Direct contact with the people using what you build
• Deploys in days, not release trains scheduled a quarter out
• Genuine influence on technical direction from your first month
• Budget for conferences, certifications, and continued learning

What You Won't Get Here

• Anywhere to hide when something you shipped breaks
• A platform team that handles infrastructure so you don't have to
• Insulation from customers when a deploy goes badly
• A mature engineering organization with established process
• Deep specialization - you'll work across mobile, web, cloud, and AI
• An existing AI platform team, or someone else's guardrails to inherit
• Remote or fully flexible arrangement - this role is on-site

Education

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field - or equivalent practical experience.
• No degree requirement we'll hold rigidly. Show us what you've shipped. Self-taught engineers with production track records are welcome here.
• AWS certifications are a plus and are not required.

Work Environment

On-site at our Charlotte headquarters, Monday through Friday, standard business hours. Expect periodic travel to partner and client sites - typically a few days at a time, several times a year. Banking platform work occasionally means an evening or a weekend around a release, a core conversion, or an incident. We run a real on-call rotation and we keep it humane.

Show Us Your Work

We ask candidates for this role to share code. A resume tells us where you've been; a repository tells us how you think. Send us one or two repositories you've built - ideally something involving Claude, a mobile or web application, or infrastructure you're proud of. Personal projects, open-source contributions, and side work all count.

If your best work is proprietary, that is not a disqualifier. Most engineers coming out of financial services cannot share what they built, and we're not going to penalize you for honoring an agreement you signed. In that case, tell us and we'll substitute a walkthrough conversation - you talk us through the architecture of something you built, the trade-offs you made, and what you'd do differently. That serves