Forward Deployed Engineer

About Us

Meet one of Turkey’s best startups. Kolay started in 2015 as Turkey’s first HR SaaS company, with the desire to simplify human resources work in companies and organizations worldwide, and let employees funnel their energy and time into more meaningful work.

Today, Kolay is a cloud-based HR management platform that streamlines expense, leave, overtime, shift, payroll, and many other processes. It is trusted by more than 2.500 companies and 300.000 employees worldwide.

And we’re just getting started. We believe the next leap in HR isn’t just better software; it’s AI that actually works inside a customer’s real processes. That’s where you come in.

About the Role

A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) doesn’t just implement-you build. You don’t just visit customers-you embed with them. And you don’t measure success in features shipped-you measure it in outcomes delivered.

You’ll sit side-by-side with our customers’ HR and payroll teams, understand their real-world problems, and build the workflows, integrations, and AI-driven automations that create measurable value. Think of yourself as a technical co-founder for each customer’s automation journey: write production code, wire up AI workflows, and own the result until it genuinely works in production.

It’s also a flywheel. What you learn with one customer becomes a pattern we can generalize into the product for the next hundred, so your work compounds far beyond a single account.

What You’ll Do

• Embed with customers: work directly with HR, payroll, and operations stakeholders, from analysts to executives, to understand their environment and problems deeply.
• Build, don’t just configure: develop custom integrations, data pipelines, scripts, and end-to-end workflows; take them to production and make them stick.
• Make AI actually work: design, deploy, and tune AI-driven HR and payroll automations for each customer’s specific reality. AI rarely works out of the box, and you’re the one who makes it deliver.
• Own outcomes: define success by the customer’s business metrics, such as time saved, errors eliminated, and adoption, not technical milestones, and drive to them.
• Close the loop with product: feed real customer patterns back to our product and engineering teams so one-off solutions become platform capabilities.
• Move fast across the stack: diagnose, prototype, and ship in tight cycles, often in ambiguous and evolving situations.

What We’re Looking For

Must-have

• Strong engineering ability: a capable coder in Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or similar, and comfortable with HTTP and RESTful services.
• Hands-on experience with AI tooling: building, integrating, or deploying AI/LLM-powered workflows, with the instinct for what it takes to make them reliable in the real world.
• Excellent communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders: you can talk schema with an engineer and ROI with a CHRO in the same meeting.
• A bias for ownership and outcomes; comfort with ambiguity and a high tolerance for messy customer environments.
• Willingness to spend meaningful time embedded with customers, both on-site and remote.

Nice-to-have

• Experience in solutions, forward-deployed, professional-services, or technical co-founder-style roles.
• Familiarity with HR, payroll, or other data- and compliance-heavy domains.
• Experience with data integrations, ETL, and cloud platforms such as AWS.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering or a related technical field.