Forward Deployed Engineer

Department: Product & Engineering Reports to: CEO Location: Scottsdale, Arizona About Wise Pelican Wise Pelican is hiring its first Forward Deployed Engineer. We want a builder who loves thinking about product and has the catch phrase, “I can fix that.” You’ll take ideas, especially around AI and our real estate marketing product, and turn them into things that make a tangible impact on our clients’ real world work. That means shipping code, talking to customers, untangling messy workflows, and owning the last 10% that makes or breaks our product. We’re a bootstrapped company, so everything we build matters. Revenue, client retention, internal ease-of-use; you help move the needle on all of it. This is a full-time, onsite position located in Scottsdale, Arizona. What Will You Do? Partner with the CEO and cross-functional leaders to identify product and AI opportunities tied to revenue, customer success, efficiency, or long-term company value. Work directly with customers and internal teams to understand their workflows, uncover the actual problem, and translate ambiguous business needs into a clear technical plan. Build full-stack solutions using Python, TypeScript, and React, including product features, internal tools, integrations, data workflows, and AI-supported applications. Own projects from discovery and prototyping through testing, production deployment, adoption, and ongoing improvement. Define what success should look like before development begins and measure whether the finished solution creates the intended business or customer outcome. Make practical decisions about scope, speed, maintainability, security, and technical quality so projects move forward without creating avoidable messes behind them. Turn successful customer-specific or internal solutions into reusable components, documented playbooks, and scalable product capabilities. Bring lessons from customers and real-world deployments back to the broader product roadmap. Keep stakeholders informed, surface risks early, and create enough structure to prevent important work from getting lost between departments. What Big Things Will You Own? At First Learn Wise Pelican’s product, technical architecture, business model, customer workflows, and current AI initiatives. Partner with the CEO to define the initial purpose, priorities, success measures, and working model for our Forward Deployed Engineering function. Review our current pipeline of product and AI ideas to identify the projects with the clearest path to revenue, user success, or meaningful operational leverage. Take an existing prototype, stalled initiative, or high-priority business problem through the final stretch and into reliable production use. Establish lightweight standards for project discovery, technical scoping, deployment, documentation, feedback, and outcome measurement. Once You Get Your Footing Own a portfolio of internal and customer-facing initiatives from business problem through measurable result. Build reusable tools, integrations, and implementation patterns so each successful project makes the next one faster and more valuable. Help determine when a customer need should remain a tailored solution and when it should become part of Wise Pelican’s core product. Help shape and eventually scale the Forward Deployed Engineering function, including its goals, processes, responsibilities, and future hiring needs. Who Are You? You have a strong software engineering foundation and evidence that you have shipped real, working software, beyond coursework, tutorials, or prototypes that have never met a paying user. You are comfortable building production applications with Python, TypeScript, and React. You understand full-stack development fundamentals, including APIs, databases, testing, debugging, deployment, authentication, and cloud-based systems. You can independently work through technical problems and know when to ask for context, support, or a second opinion. You can speak with customers, executives, developers, and nontechnical stakeholders without requiring everyone else to learn your language first. You communicate progress, tradeoffs, risks, and changing expectations before they become surprises. You enjoy understanding how a business works and can connect technical decisions to revenue, adoption, efficiency, risk, and customer outcomes. You are comfortable beginning with an unclear problem, asking direct questions, organizing the moving pieces, and creating a reasonable path forward. You use numerous AI development tools thoughtfully. You want to build and deliver, not recommend what someone else should build. Where Can You Easily Impress Us? You have built or deployed production systems involving LLMs, AI agents, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluations, guardrails, or human-in-the-loop workflows. You have worked directly with customers through implementation, solutions engineering, technical consulting, product development, or a similar role. You have experience inside an early-stage or bootstrapped company where you had to operate without layers of process, specialized teams, or unlimited resources. You have worked with marketing automation, CRMs, HubSpot, real estate technology, workflow automation, or data-heavy SaaS products. You can show us a project where you identified the problem, built the solution, launched it, and learned whether it actually worked. What’s In It for You? Major Medical Insurance: Working at Wise Pelican gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. And happy people just don’t get sick. But if that does happen, we offer major medical insurance to assist with life’s biggest nuisance. Dental & Vision Coverage: An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Talking dental and vision insurance, of course. No need for revenge when eyes and teeth are insured. Paid Time Away: The PTA you actually want to be involved with. Employees receive three weeks of Paid Time Off, sick time, parental leave, and seven company holidays per year. Professional Development Stipends: “Pay me what you owe me! Don’t act like you forgot! WPBHMM!” — You to Wise Pelican about fronting the bill for your professional development needs. 401(k) at Tenure Milestone: We hope you’ll want to stop working here one day. This should help. Compensation: This role is currently benchmarked between $125,000 and $160,000 per year. Offered compensation will be based on relevant technical depth, demonstrated ability to ship production software, and readiness to independently own customer-facing deployments.