Forward Deployed Engineer
About the Role
This is a forward-deployed engineering role at an early-stage AI/ML startup, sitting at the intersection of customer success and core product development. You will own the full lifecycle of new customer deployments, from initial integration through first detection to first merged PR, and feed everything you learn back into the product. You report directly to the founding leadership on a small, high-impact team.
What You'll Do
Own new customer deployments end to end: drive integration, surface first traces, catch first failures, and land first PRs in their codebases.
Embed in customer Slack channels and become the resident expert on their agent architecture and failure modes.
Write detection logic and evals tailored to each customer's specific problems, then generalize recurring patterns across the customer base.
Open PRs against unfamiliar codebases and defend them in code review with engineers who did not ask for your help.
Represent the company solo in critical conversations including security reviews, deployment architecture decisions, and trust-building discussions.
Continuously feed learnings back into the product so that manual work shrinks every quarter.
What We're Looking For
3 or more years shipping production software, with demonstrated success working directly with customers in a forward-deployed, solutions engineering, consulting, or founding capacity.
Strong TypeScript proficiency and comfort reading, patching, and opening PRs against unfamiliar codebases constantly.
Real, hands-on experience building and running AI agents in production, with genuine opinions about why they fail.
Experience writing detection logic, evals, and observability or monitoring code for production systems.
Demonstrated ability to walk into an unfamiliar company, understand what matters, and identify critical issues within days.
Comfortable with ambiguity and fast execution: you compress the time between "something is broken" and "it's fixed."
Experience with security reviews and deployment architecture discussions is a strong plus.
Prior experience running agents in production yourself, with production incidents to learn from, is a bonus.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $150,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, California, six days per week, with travel to customer sites.