Forward Deployed Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 12, 2026. First seen by Alion on Jun 30, 2026. People In AI scores B on the Alion truth index.
Senior Forward Deployed Engineer
(Applied AI, Geospatial Data & Customer Deployment)
Compensation: $200,000 - $220,000 base + equity
Location: Bay Area / San Mateo strongly preferred
The Company
A high-growth AI-native company is building an intelligence platform for the built world, helping cities, developers, architects, investors, and underwriters make faster, better decisions across planning, permitting, and development.
Its platform combines AI, geospatial context, regulatory data, and domain expertise to help customers understand feasibility, model trade-offs, and accelerate complex real estate and urban development decisions.
The Opportunity
This is a first-in-function Forward Deployed Engineering role, designed for an engineer who wants to sit at the intersection of product, customers, data, and software.
You will be the technical lead on customer deployments, helping a cutting-edge AI platform move from product capability to real-world adoption and measurable impact.
The Role
You will own the technical “last mile” of deployment, adapting the platform to customer-specific geographies, datasets, regulations, and workflows.
This is a hands-on engineering role with meaningful customer exposure: part production coding, part technical discovery, part data onboarding, and part customer-facing solution delivery.
What You’ll Do
Lead technical onboarding for cities, developers, and other strategic customers.
Build and adapt data pipelines for complex geospatial, parcel, zoning, CAD, regulatory, and jurisdiction-specific datasets.
Write production-ready Python to support data manipulation, platform integrations, and customer-specific deployment needs.
Work directly with customers to understand their data, definitions, constraints, and success criteria.
Translate customer requirements and edge cases into product feedback, roadmap input, and technical implementation plans.
Partner with engineering, product, customer success, account management, and domain experts to deliver customer value quickly.
Own the technical side of multiple customer engagements as the company scales deployment.
What You’ll Bring
3+ years of software engineering experience, ideally with meaningful customer-facing or product-facing ownership.
Strong Python skills and experience writing production or near-production code.
Hands-on experience building data pipelines, integrations, onboarding workflows, or data-heavy customer solutions.
Strong technical communication skills, with the ability to explain complex engineering work clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Experience in full-stack engineering, data engineering, data science, or a closely related technical discipline.
High ownership, strong product judgment, and comfort operating in an early-stage environment with evolving requirements.
Genuine interest in customer impact, housing, cities, sustainability, infrastructure, or applying AI to real-world problems.
What This Role Requires
Strong software engineering fundamentals and hands-on Python experience.
Experience working with data pipelines or technical onboarding workflows.
Ability to lead high-stakes customer-facing technical conversations.
Willingness to travel domestically and internationally when customer needs require it.
Motivation to work in an impact-oriented, early-stage AI company.
Tech Stack
Python
SQL and cloud data warehouses
APIs and data integrations
Geospatial data formats such as GeoJSON and shapefiles
Parcel, zoning, CAD, regulatory, and jurisdiction-specific datasets
Full-stack application development is a plus
Why Join
Be the first Forward Deployed Engineer and help define a critical function from the ground up.
Work on a technically rich AI platform with geospatial, regulatory, data, and customer deployment challenges.
Join a collaborative, mission-driven team building technology aimed at improving how housing, cities, and development decisions get made.
About People in AI
People in AI is a specialist recruitment partner connecting exceptional AI, machine learning, data, and engineering talent with some of the most ambitious technology companies in the world. We work closely with founders, technical leaders, and hiring teams to represent opportunities accurately and help candidates assess genuine fit.