Forward Deployed Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 1, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 12, 2026.
About the company
Our client is a fast-growing software company.
The role
Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Work as a hands-on engineer embedded with large business customers, owning technical deployment and ongoing success after the sale. Split time between building custom tooling, supporting pre-sales technical evaluations and acting as a bridge between customers and internal product and engineering teams. This is a founding role in a newly created function.
What you'll do
- Support sales colleagues before the sale by running technical evaluations, building demo applications and helping win competitive bake-offs.
- Own technical success for a small set of enterprise accounts, meeting with customers regularly to resolve issues, deepen adoption and open up expansion.
- Build whatever the customer needs, from an evaluation app to a tailored agent or changes to an existing product surface.
- Develop strong relationships with customer stakeholders, especially technical ones.
- Create diagnostics, dashboards and evaluation harnesses to measure performance and catch regressions across environments.
- Relay usability gaps, unmet needs and opportunities back to product and engineering teams.
- Work directly with founders and customers to help shape product direction and engineering strategy.
Requirements
What we're looking for
- Several years of hands-on experience taking software live in production environments, ideally for customers with demanding or regulated requirements.
- A background at a well-regarded early-stage company, delivering working software to business clients.
- Strong Python proficiency, with the ability to work in Bash and infrastructure as needed.
- Fluency with AI-assisted coding tools and a solid grasp of LLM and machine learning concepts.
- Comfort leading technical discussions on customer calls, with clear and polished communication.
- A quantitative, hands-on approach: able to debug, experiment and iterate quickly across the full development lifecycle.
- A high bar for quality, strong ownership and the agency to step in and fix problems rather than only flag them.
- Willingness to build your own small tools, such as a quick app to test a hypothesis or assemble a dataset.
Bonus points
- Founding experience or early-stage product building.
- Prior experience in a forward-deployed role supporting large customers.
- Ability to design and run evaluations.
- Comfort acting as both a backend-leaning engineer and a customer-facing lead.
- Up-to-date knowledge of developments in ML and AI.
- Degree from a top-tier university.
Benefits
Compensation and benefits
- Base salary: USD 220,000 to 320,000 per year
- Equity
- Health, dental and vision coverage
- Parental leave
- Flexible time off
- Wellness benefits
Location and work model
- San Francisco, CA, United States
- On-site, 5 days per week in office
- Full-time