We are looking for a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer with 1-5 years of experience to own the customer-facing build at a fast-scaling AI startup, embedding AI agents directly into the procurement and supply chain operations of Fortune 500 manufacturers. You will be the engineer in the field: shipping production code, scoping new workflows with existing customers, and building the deployment motion from the ground up alongside the founding team.
What will you be doing?
Own relationships with existing manufacturing customers day-to-day, working closely with their IT, supply chain, and procurement teams to identify and scope new workflows and use cases.
Build and ship production code in customer environments, extending the platform to meet customer needs in a way that scales across the broader customer base.
Take new deployments from discovery through go-live, owning outcomes (inventory, sourcing efficiency, forecast accuracy) end-to-end.
Travel on-site to manufacturer facilities (about 15-30% of the time, including internationally to Europe and Asia) to embed alongside operators and earn the trust that makes agents stick.
Close the loop with the platform engineering team, bringing field learnings back to make the next deployment faster and more reliable.
The role involves roughly 75% customer interaction and 25% core platform development.
- 1-5 years of experience in a customer-facing full-stack or forward-deployed engineering role with a strong technical foundation
- Full-stack engineering caliber: can ship production code independently in enterprise environments (pure solutions engineers without strong engineering depth are a poor fit)
- Customer-facing deployment experience: has owned end-to-end technical deployments with real operators, not just internal feature shipping
- Experience at a VC-backed, high-growth tech startup shipping production code in enterprise customer environments, or a forward-deployed role (e.g. Palantir, Gecko Robotics, Sierra, or similar); pure Big Tech backgrounds are less preferred
- Scoped end-to-end automation/workflow deployments: gathered technical requirements, built and shipped the solution
- Identified and driven new use cases within existing customer accounts
- Translated ambiguous customer problems into technical specs and shipped them to production
- Comfortable with APIs, SQL, and Python or similar and can reason about messy enterprise data
- Strong communicator with a curious, disciplined mindset: asks questions to build an accurate mental model before jumping to solutions
- Raw problem-solving ability: can take a super abstract problem and systematically narrow toward the optimal solution
- Prior exposure to manufacturing, industrial, or supply chain environments preferred
- Based in San Francisco and able to work 5 days/week in-person; must be comfortable with international travel (about 15-30%, primarily Europe and Asia)
- CS degree from a top school preferred