Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer (Founding FDE)

A problem residing inside almost every large enterprise.

A well-backed AI startup with revenue multiplying year on year. A small team. Trusted by customers that range from fast-growing AI companies to the largest enterprises around.

A founding technical role - the first Forward Deployed Engineer hire - owning deployments end to end before the playbook exists. Early enough that this hire shapes the function, so the equity could have real upside.

This is not a sales engineer who runs the demo and moves on. Not an architect who draws the diagram and leaves the build to someone else. You'll clear the same engineering bar as the core team, embed in the customer's environment, and own the system in production - pre-sales through to expansion.

Our client is looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed directly with enterprise customers, turn a complex technical platform into live production deployments, and own the journey from first proof-of-concept through to expanded, self-sustaining accounts. This is the first FDE into a function being built from scratch. You'll help define how it scales, with a small team forming around you over the coming year.

What You'll Be Doing

• Embed with enterprise customers pre-sales - run proper evals on their real data, prove results, and build custom applications that show why the platform wins
• Own the full deployment lifecycle, from first proof-of-concept through to a production system running against a customer's most important workflows

Looking to advance your Development & Programming career with relocation support? Explore Development & Programming Jobs with Relocation Packages that include comprehensive packages to help you move and settle in your new role.

• Build and ship customer-facing applications, especially for enterprises without their own dev teams, designing the immersive, embedded experiences that make a deployment stick
• Design, run and iterate eval frameworks - and get good at putting an eval in front of a customer in a way that earns their trust
• Post-sales, take ownership of one to a handful of accounts: meet them weekly, unblock them, build relationships with their engineers, and open up new teams and use cases
• Work shoulder to shoulder with sales, solutions and customer success on the highest-profile, most complex deals
• Be the sharpest signal in the company on what customers actually need - feed real deployment insight back to the founders and product team, and turn recurring custom work into core product
• Help define how the function scales - as the first FDE, you'll write the playbook the rest of the team follows

What You'll Need

Essential

• 3-6 years shipping production software in full-stack or product engineering - backend-leaning is fine
• Strong Python, Typescript and the range to build a product-grade application end to end without a dedicated engineer beside you
• Real AI/LLM fluency - you build with modern AI coding tools and understand LLM and ML concepts well enough to configure, debug and improve, not just call an API
• Comfortable designing and running evals, and showing a customer why the results hold up
• At ease in customer conversations - you can hold a technical discussion and present your own work clearly

Discover our full range of relocation jobs with comprehensive support packages to help you relocate and settle in your new location.

Bonus

• Experience at a recognisable startup shipping production software to enterprise customers
• An ex-founder or true generalist who's worn both the engineering and the customer-facing hat and can flex either way
• Cloud platforms, API integration patterns, SQL and comfort in enterprise data environments

The Person

You lean into customers and solutions, not away from them. You find the translation problem - turning a messy, real-world enterprise need into a working system - more interesting than any purely internal build. You're comfortable in ambiguity: this is a brand-new function with no playbook, and you'd rather define the problem as you go than wait for a perfect spec. You ship, learn and iterate, and you want your work live and improving in production within days of a new engagement. Whether you lean more engineer or more customer-facing, you can pull toward the other when a deal needs it.

The Role

• Full-time, New York - 5 days a week in office to start, with remote flexibility possible as the function matures
• $200,000 - $300,000 base, benchmarked to the top of market, plus meaningful early-stage equity
• Visa sponsorship and relocation supported for outstanding applicants
• Benefits: unlimited PTO, free daily lunch, commuting, medical, dental and vision, and flexible parental leave
• You'll report directly to a hands-on founder, as one of the first hires into a customer-facing engineering team set to grow to around five this year, including a lead