Forward Deployed Engineer (Enterprise AI)

 

About the Company

An early-stage AI company that places engineers directly inside enterprises and frontier AI labs to automate complex, real-world workflows, starting with engineering and life sciences. The company works with mid-market enterprises generating more than $50M in revenue, and partners directly with several of the leading AI labs, using what it learns in the field to build the evaluation data and environments that improve frontier models. Backed by a well-known early-stage venture fund and notable angel investors, the company is already at a significant run rate and growing fast, with the team roughly doubling in size by year-end.

About the Role

This Forward Deployed Engineer builds and deploys workflow automations inside enterprise customers. You'll work directly with customer teams to understand how a process runs today, identify where automation helps, and ship systems that hold up in production, pairing with the teammates who own each customer relationship and program plan on technical design, evaluation, and deployment. Because these are contract-style engagements, there's downtime between projects, and the team wants someone with enough agency to use that downtime well, including supporting upsells and founder-led go-to-market. This is not a sales role, but personability matters: you should be able to run a customer meeting and represent the company's vision without a founder in the room.

What You'll Own

• Mapping existing enterprise processes with the teammates who own each account, scoping automation workflows including success criteria, data access, and constraints
• Building evaluations that measure whether a workflow performs reliably on the customer's real data and edge cases, before and after go-live
• Deploying automations in customer environments, monitoring performance, and fixing production failures
• Turning recurring customer needs and deployment lessons into reusable platform capabilities alongside the platform engineering team
• Using downtime between engagements productively: upsells, phase-two scoping, and supporting go-to-market

What We're Looking For

• 1 to 4 years of professional experience
• Strong programming ability with a track record of shipping production software, ideally in a customer-facing or consulting engineering role
• Ability to learn an unfamiliar business process fast and translate it into a concrete technical plan
• Comfort testing systems whose outputs are hard to verify, and judgment for when something is ready for production
• Clear communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including customers while requirements are still forming
• Prior experience as a forward deployed engineer at another AI startup, or a technical role at a company with a forward-deployed motion, is the strongest signal
• High agency and genuinely personable, comfortable running a customer meeting solo
• Bonus: experience with AI agents, enterprise systems integration, or workflow automation in engineering or life sciences

Logistics

San Francisco, in-office, with an intense pace (9-9-6). Compensation is $175K to $350K base plus commission and equity. Visa sponsorship is limited.