Forward Deployed Engineer

Rockstar is recruiting for a company on a mission to revitalize American manufacturing by building AI workers for back-office departments like quoting, purchasing, invoicing, and sales coordination. They're backed by a16z speedrun and angels from Brex, Xwing, and Betterment. This role is a client-facing technical position at the intersection of customers, product, and applied AI.

About the Role

This is a client-facing technical role at the intersection of customers, product, and applied AI. The individual will work directly with American manufacturers to understand how their business operates, turn messy requirements into clear agent behaviors, and deploy a reliable Frank that delivers measurable value.

The person in this role will own customer agent deployments end-to-end: map workflows, prioritize requirements, write SOPs and prompts, build evals, configure tools and guardrails, launch with users, and improve performance over time. The inputs are real and imperfect: dirty PDFs, legacy data, tribal knowledge, and edge cases that break naive systems.

The work is hands-on, fast-moving, and deeply user-centric. The individual will work with LLMs and code every day, communicate directly with customer teams, and turn what they learn in the field into better product capabilities and a faster, more repeatable deployment system.

What You'll Do

• Lead agent deployments from discovery and requirements scoping through configuration, go-live, quantified ROI, and ongoing improvement
• Map complex customer workflows and turn them into focused requirements, SOPs, prompts, tools, guardrails, approvals, and handoffs
• Build evals and test cases that measure agent quality, expose failure modes, and guide iteration
• Configure and launch agents, monitor their real-world performance, investigate failures, and improve reliability over time
• Run customer workshops, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and close every dependency and follow-up needed to keep deployments moving
• Learn complex customer domains quickly and advocate for customer needs with product and engineering
• Turn repeated deployment problems into reusable patterns, tooling, and product improvements that make future launches faster

What You'll Need

• You have 4+ years of experience in software engineering or a client-facing technical role such as forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, or implementation consulting
• You are technically strong and comfortable writing code, prompting LLMs, building evals, and learning new agent-engineering techniques
• You can scope ambiguous requirements, prioritize aggressively, and design a simple solution within real product and operational constraints
• You are an exceptional communicator who can run a customer workshop, present with confidence, and build trust from the shop floor to the executive team
• You are highly organized and process-oriented: you can manage multiple deployments, track details, use metrics, and close every loop
• You learn complex domains quickly and combine customer empathy with a product mindset, turning field insights into better tools and experiences
• You are ambitious, resourceful, action-oriented, and team-first; you care about strengthening American manufacturing and are excited to work in person five days a week in NYC and travel to customer sites across the US

Bonus Points

• Experience building and operating agentic systems in production
• Experience in manufacturing or another industrial or operationally complex setting
• Experience creating SOPs or leading change-management work
• Experience integrating and deploying third-party APIs or legacy systems

About the Company

Revitalize an industry. Rebuild America's manufacturing backbone.

America builds satellites, jet engines, and semiconductors with world-class precision, but the software running factory offices is decades behind. Estimators, procurement teams, and accountants still lose hours to spreadsheets, PDFs, and manual data entry.

They build AI workers for back office departments like quoting, purchasing, invoicing, and sales coordination. By removing back-office bottlenecks, they help US manufacturers move faster, grow, and compete globally.

They're backed by a16z speedrun and angels from Brex, Xwing, and Betterment. Join them in rebuilding the digital foundation of American manufacturing.

The Founders

• Jack Strauss - Co-Founder & CEO: Jack began his career at Acer and Northrop Grumman, then advised industrial companies at Bain. At Xwing, he helped scale the company and led GTM through its acquisition by Joby Aviation. He holds an MBA from Stanford and a BA from USC.
• Alex Pareto - Co-Founder & CTO: Alex began his career at Meta, founded YC-backed Demeanor, and joined NTWRK after its acquisition. He later became a founding engineer on Brex Spend Management and led its engineering organization. He holds a BS in Computer Science from USC.

How They Work

• In person every day in NYC for high-bandwidth collaboration
• Talk to users constantly: they build with manufacturers, not for them
• Own outcomes end-to-end and drive solutions without waiting for permission

Their Values

• We're Here to Win: We are building to help American manufacturers, our customers, our company, and our teammates win at the highest level.
• There's Always a Way: We are relentlessly resourceful, take ownership of constraints, and find a path forward when others stop.
• Truth Over Comfort: We choose honesty over ego, surface reality quickly, and change course when the facts demand it.
• Act Now: We move fast, trust our instincts, and correct course as we go.
• Step Up: We act like founders, fill gaps, fix problems, and follow through until the work is done.
• The Team. The Team. The Team.: We put the team first, push and support each other, share wins, and own failures together.

Comp & Benefits

• Base salary: $175,000-$215,000 depending on level and experience
• Equity: the opportunity to receive meaningful early-stage equity ($50,000-$90,000 per year) in the company
• Perks: great healthcare coverage, dinner provided at the office, and unlimited Celsius

Location

You'll be in their NYC office five days a week. If you're looking for a role where the real work happens somewhere else, this isn't it; if you want to be at the center of both the company and the customer, it is.