Founding Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

Job Description

Job Description

San Francisco, CA · On-site · Full-time
Compensation: $180,000–$260,000 + competitive equity

About the Company

A venture-backed startup building AI agents for the logistics industry. The product reads shipment documents, classifies goods, and generates compliant customs filings with minimal manual input — automating the document-heavy workflows that global trade still runs on, so logistics teams can clear shipments faster and with fewer errors. The company is past the zero-to-one phase with clear product-market fit and is already deployed with customers processing meaningful operational volume. The deeply technical team comes from leading technology companies, top schools, and AI research labs.

Industry: AI · Logistics · Customs automation

The Role

We're hiring our first Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to be the technical owner of our deepest enterprise customer relationships. You'll live inside the workflows of logistics companies — writing the code, designing the integrations, and shipping the customer-facing capabilities that make the product real in production. As the first FDE, you set the bar: how the team scopes, ships, tests, and turns customer-facing work into broader platform leverage. You'll work directly with founders, engineering leadership, and customer decision-makers.

What you'll be doing

• Own strategic enterprise accounts end to end — technical discovery, integration architecture, build customer-facing capabilities, and stay engaged through go-live and beyond.
• Ship customer-facing engineering — production code touching document-heavy workflows, regulatory filing surfaces, customer integrations, and AI-driven extraction pipelines.
• Build capabilities that strengthen the broader platform, bringing learnings back to the core team.
• Set the bar for customer-facing engineering — testing, staging discipline, deployment safety, and code quality standards.

Tech stack: Python, document processing pipelines, modern AI/LLM infrastructure, integrations.

Requirements

• 5-9 years engineering, senior IC or tech lead
• Prior FDE or Solutions Engineering at AI or enterprise software company
• Strong Python, document processing, LLM infra fluency
• Comfortable with Director-level stakeholders
• SF in-person, founding-seat ownership

Green Flags

• Logistics, shipping, customs, freight, or supply chain domain experience. Significant plus.
• Demonstrated comfort owning enterprise accounts end to end: technical discovery, integration architecture, go-live, and post-go-live support.

Red Flags

• Preference for deep work without customer surface area
• Need for clean specs and narrowly bounded scope
• Discomfort with unscheduled customer calls for production issues
• Requirement for extensive process to be productive

Why Join

• Founding-level ownership and equity — first FDE on the team.
• Technical owner of the company's most strategic enterprise accounts.
• Work directly with founders and engineering leadership; title and impact to match responsibility.

Details

• Location: San Francisco, CA
• Work policy: On-site (in-person)
• Compensation: $180,000–$260,000 + competitive equity
• Visa sponsorship: None available
• Employment type: Full-time