Forward Deployed Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 14, 2026. First seen by Alion on Nov 14, 2026. Raydar scores B on the Alion truth index.
About the company
Our client is a small software company.
The role
Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Take early-stage software from server-side code to a usable interface, working alongside customers and technical leadership to shape what gets built next. Ownership of core systems begins on day one.
What you'll do
- Ship complete features across server-side code and the user interface.
- Spend time on site with the people who use the product to understand their daily work.
- Turn what you learn in the field into product direction alongside technical leadership.
- Own core systems from the early days of the product.
Requirements
What we're looking for
- Explains technical ideas clearly to both technical and non-technical people.
- Has shipped production software end to end, including backend and enough front end to make it real.
- Drives work independently, proposing problems to solve and approaches without waiting for direction.
- Background in young companies, particularly industry-focused software or AI teams that deal with older systems.
- Hands-on time at a company where artificial intelligence is the core product.
- Comfortable translating client needs into engineering specs and seeing the work through to launch.
- Experience putting large language model functionality into live products, including structured outputs, external tool invocation, chained agent steps and search-based context lookup.
- Proficient at making language-model software reliable in production: strict data contracts, guarding against fabricated output, keeping people in the review loop, and measuring quality with automated test suites and model-graded scoring.
- Willing to travel to customer locations around the US roughly twice each quarter.
Bonus points
- Past experience founding a company, or familiarity with car dealership operations.
- Experience with agent frameworks and agent-UI protocols.
- Familiarity with connecting to outside software services through authorization flows, event callbacks and data format translation.
- Experience with speech-to-text or multimodal work, such as voice or photo, in noisy real-world settings.
Benefits
Compensation and benefits
- Base salary: $187K - $220K
- Equity
- Health insurance coverage
Location and work model
- San Mateo, California, United States
- Hybrid, 3 days a week in office (Tuesday to Thursday)
- Full-time