Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

Elevate (YC S24) is hiring high-autonomy, analytical Forward Deployed Engineers to help build the AI execution layer for the real economy.

We believe the next generation of enterprise software won’t just help people understand their businesses, it will do the work. Elevate is building the system that connects fragmented operational data, understands how a business runs, and deploys AI agents to execute increasingly complex workflows autonomously.

We’re starting with acquisitions. Private equity-backed roll-ups and other serial acquirers are forced to integrate new businesses, systems, data, and processes over and over again. That makes them the perfect proving ground for a new kind of software.

As an FDE, you’ll work directly with customers to turn that real-world complexity into software: integrating systems, modeling businesses, deploying AI workflows, and helping determine what gets built into the core Elevate platform.

This is a high-ownership role at the center of the company.

About Elevate

Elevate is the AI operating system for acquisitions.

Our customers are private equity-backed roll-ups, holding companies, and other acquisition-driven businesses. Today, we help them solve some of the hardest problems created by M&A: migrating and integrating systems, creating a unified operational data layer, producing cross-company intelligence, and automating workflows like month-end close, payroll, and diligence.

But acquisitions are the wedge.

Most businesses still run across a fragmented collection of systems of record, including ERP, CRM, field service, payroll, accounting, and dozens of vertical-specific applications. Humans sit between those systems, manually moving information, reconciling data, making decisions, and executing work.

AI can increasingly perform that work. The bottleneck is giving it the context and ability to act across the business.

That’s what we’re building.

Our long-term vision is to make the real economy programmable: a platform that understands how businesses operate across their underlying systems and can deploy agents to execute the work itself.

We’re already serving more than 15 mid-market and large-cap customers across industries including HVAC, pest control, fire & life safety, restoration, accounting, property management, and other fragmented service industries. Our deployments span dozens of operational systems and large, messy datasets that were never designed to work together.

Elevate was founded by operators and investors who saw firsthand how much critical work still happens between systems, through spreadsheets, manual reconciliation, and institutional knowledge. Our founding team brings experience from Bain, BCG, Sycamore Partners, Meta, Away, IBM, and Circle.

We’ve grown quickly with a small team and are hiring aggressively in response to customer demand. We’re backed by Y Combinator and South Park Commons and well-capitalized to build for the long term.

The Role

Forward Deployed Engineers are core to how Elevate builds.

The most valuable AI systems won’t be designed from a conference room. They’ll be built by getting deep into real businesses, understanding how work actually happens, and turning messy operational processes into repeatable software.

You’ll own that loop.

You’ll sit directly between customers and our core engineering team: understanding a CFO’s problem, interrogating the underlying data and systems, designing the solution, shipping it, and then helping turn what worked into scalable product.

One week, that might mean designing a canonical data model across ten acquired businesses. The next, building an agent that reconciles financial data, automating a workflow currently performed by an operations team, or working with engineering to generalize something you discovered into the platform.

You’ll have significant customer exposure, work directly with Elevate’s founders and engineering team, and influence both what we build and how we go to market.

We’re deliberately open-minded about background. You might be an exceptional data consultant who knows SQL and wants to become highly technical. You might be a software engineer who wants to spend more time understanding businesses and working directly with customers.

What matters most is that you are intensely analytical, highly autonomous, technically curious, and excited to build.

What You’ll Do

• Own deployments end-to-end: Understand the business problem, map the underlying processes and systems, ingest and transform data, build the solution, deploy it, and iterate with the customer

• Build AI systems that do real work: Turn manual operational processes into software and agentic workflows that can execute autonomously

• Shape the core Elevate platform: Identify patterns across deployments and work directly with engineering to turn bespoke solutions into reusable infrastructure and product

• Model complex businesses in data: Unify fragmented systems, define canonical business logic, and create the context layer that allows AI to reason and act reliably

• Work directly with customers: Partner with CFOs, operators, integration leaders, and other executives at sophisticated acquisition-driven businesses

• Help drive expansion and GTM: Identify where Elevate can solve additional problems and participate in the conversations that shape new products and customer relationships

Your First 90 Days

You will not spend your first three months onboarding into a narrow slice of the product. You’ll be expected to own real customer problems quickly.

In your first 30 days, you’ll learn the Elevate platform, work directly with our founders and engineers, and contribute to a live customer deployment involving real operational systems and data.

By 60 days, you’ll own a meaningful portion of a deployment yourself, from understanding the customer’s business logic through data transformation, validation, and delivery.

By 90 days, you’ll be running major parts of customer deployments independently, building new workflows on top of the Elevate platform, and helping identify which patterns should become reusable product.

The goal is simple: within your first few months, customers should know you by name and the product should be better because of what you learned in the field.

Who You Are

• Exceptionally analytical. You can take an ambiguous problem, break it down quickly, and get to the underlying answer

• High autonomy. You don’t wait for perfectly specified requirements. You figure out what needs to happen and make it happen

• Technically fluent. You’re comfortable working with data and excited to build with modern AI tooling

• Commercially minded. You care about whether what you build actually solves the customer’s problem, not just whether the code works

• A strong communicator. You can go from debugging a data pipeline to explaining the result to a CFO

• Comfortable with messiness. Real businesses have imperfect data, legacy systems, undocumented processes, and edge cases. You see that as the interesting part

• Hungry. You want responsibility, steep learning curves, and the opportunity to build something ambitious from the ground up

Typical candidates will have 2+ years of experience in data engineering, analytics engineering, software engineering, technical consulting, or AI, with a desire to work much closer to customers and business problems.

Bonus Points

• Strong SQL and Python skills
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs, AI coding tools, or agent frameworks
• Experience building data pipelines, internal data platforms, system integrations, or migration infrastructure
• Experience automating business workflows
• Exposure to private equity, M&A, roll-ups, or integration work
• Experience working with ERP, CRM, accounting, field-service, or other operational systems
• You’ve built something meaningful outside the boundaries of your formal job

Why Elevate

Build at the application frontier of AI. We’re not building another copilot or chatbot. We’re building systems that connect to the messy operational reality of businesses and execute work.

Work on problems where AI has immediate ROI. Our customers have real budgets, real deadlines, and workflows that are painful today, not hypothetical use cases five years from now.

Turn deployments into product. Our forward-deployed model gives us access to the hardest operational problems inside real businesses. Every deployment expands the system’s capabilities and informs what we build next.

Get extraordinary ownership. You’ll work directly with founders, engineers, and customer executives and own important problems from first conversation through production.

Join early. We have meaningful revenue, sophisticated customers, strong backing, and a very small team. The people joining now will have an outsized impact on the company we become.

Our Values

Bias to Action

Ship, learn, and iterate. We value momentum and real customer feedback over theoretical perfection.

Assume Good Intentions

We work quickly and directly across disciplines. We solve problems together rather than assigning blame.

Professional Development

Everyone at Elevate should be building the next version of themselves. We invest time and energy in making each other better.

Compensation

Competitive cash compensation plus meaningful equity in an early-stage, high-growth company.