Forward Deployed Engineer
About the Role
This is a high-impact, customer-facing engineering role at an early-stage AI/ML startup, sitting at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success. You will own the full lifecycle of new customer deployments, from initial integration through first detection to first merged PR, and report directly to senior leadership on a small, focused team. Your work directly shapes both customer outcomes and the product itself.
What You'll Do
Own new customer onboarding end to end: drive integrations, surface first traces, catch first failures, and land first PRs in their codebases.
Embed in customer communication channels and become the go-to expert on their agent architecture and failure modes.
Write detection logic and evals tailored to each customer's specific problems, then generalize recurring patterns into product improvements.
Open PRs against unfamiliar codebases and defend them in code review with engineers who did not invite your involvement.
Represent the company solo in critical conversations including security reviews, deployment architecture decisions, and trust-building discussions.
Feed learnings back into the product continuously so that manual work shrinks every quarter.
What We're Looking For
3 or more years shipping production software, with demonstrated success in customer-facing roles such as forward deployment, solutions engineering, consulting, or founding a company.
Strong TypeScript proficiency and comfort reading, patching, and navigating unfamiliar codebases quickly.
Real, hands-on experience building and deploying AI agents in production environments, with genuine opinions about how and why they fail.
Experience writing detection logic, evals, and observability or monitoring code for production systems.
Ability to rapidly understand new systems, identify what matters, and move from "something is broken" to "it's fixed" with minimal ramp time.
Comfort with ambiguity: you can walk into an unfamiliar organization and orient yourself quickly.
Bonus: prior experience running agents in production yourself and dealing with production incidents firsthand.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $150,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, California, with travel to customer sites as needed.