- Job title
- Founding Engineer
- Job location
- San Francisco, CA, US
- Job description
- **Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)**
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will work directly with customers and the founding team to turn real industrial workflows into working end-to-end agents.
One day you may be mapping how an inside sales team handles RFQs. The next day you may be building a messy integration, improving product matching, writing evals for an agent, or talking to a 65 year old industry veteran to capture their knowledge.
**What You’ll Do**
\- Build AI agents for quote intake, order entry, product matching, pricing, inventory checks, and customer/vendor communication.
\- Integrate with messy real-world systems: Mainframe ERPs, CRMs, email inboxes, semi-broken APIs, scattered spreadsheets, etc.
\- Work directly with users to understand how work actually happens, not how a process doc says it happens.
\- Ship full-stack features across backend services, internal tools, customer-facing UI, and data pipelines.
\- Build learning loops so agents get more reliable over time.
\- Debug production issues in customer environments and turn one-off fixes into reusable product improvements.
**You Might Be a Fit If**
\- You are technical, completing a CS degree or similar, and love Claude Code/Codex etc with multiple agents running in parallel.
\- You like the idea of sitting next to a user and building product on the spot.
\- You have built projects using LLMs outside class: startups, hackathons, open-source, research, automation scripts, internal tools. Bonus if it has had some users. Extra bonus if those users yelled at you about something!
\- You can explain technical ideas to non-technical people and genuinely have fun doing it.
\- You are curious about industries other than tech.
**Nice To Have**
\- Experience with industrials or distribution, ERP systems, Outlook integrations
\- Prior customer-facing technical work: FDE, solutions engineering, implementation, consulting, founder, or freelance projects.
**Why Join**
\- Real ownership: your work will be used by customers and you will hear immediately if something does not work (and be expected to fix it).
\- Travel: you will be flying to customer sites, sitting with teams, and seeing your agents do work in real environments.
\- Exposure to the full startup loop: customer discovery, product decisions, engineering tradeoffs, deployment, support, and iteration.
\- A chance to build AI for an overlooked but massive part of the economy.
