Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
Please note: Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Founding Forward Deployed Engineer at seed-stage AI SaaS, blending engineering and customer-facing work to ship solutions for enterprise accounts.
ABOUT THE ROLE
This is a founding-level, high-impact role at a seed-stage AI SaaS company that automates marketing and packaging content review for large, regulated enterprises. The product is live and expanding with marquee enterprise customers — the company is firmly past validation and into scaling.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), you'll sit at the intersection of customers, product, and engineering. You'll go on-site with enterprise accounts, run deep discovery, and ship working solutions against real workflows — often within days. You'll work directly alongside the founding team in live enterprise sales and expansion cycles, and the signal you bring back shapes what gets built next. This is a builder's role with a strong customer-facing edge.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Customer discovery: Go on-site with enterprise customers, ask the questions that uncover unmet needs (not just stated ones), and distinguish what's genuinely worth solving from what isn't.
- POC execution: Configure and ship against real customer workflows. Write code, build integrations, and help customers realize value fast — before the week is out.
- Product signal: Translate field learnings into actionable product requirements. Identify patterns across customers, help prioritize the roadmap, and bring structured insight back to engineering in a form they can act on.
- Stakeholder credibility: Build trust across engineering, design, sales, and customer leadership without direct authority. Be the external face of the product — clear enough for a CMO, deep enough for a technical lead.
- Product partnership: Work closely with founders, product, and engineering to shape roadmap decisions and ensure what gets built is grounded in real customer needs.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional experience in software engineering, forward deployed engineering, or a closely related technical role
- Demonstrated track record of career progression and promotions
- Minimum 2-year average tenure across roles
- Startup experience strongly preferred; candidates with deep CPG or regulated-industry experience will also be considered
- Comfortable writing code and picking up whatever the job requires — you ship, you don't hand off
- Experience helping build products from 0→1 and converting customer feedback into product direction
- Strong instincts for customer needs; able to distinguish what people say they need from what they actually need
- Confident communicator with enterprise stakeholders at all levels, from IC to C-suite
Nice to have
- Experience with marketing tech, compliance workflows, or regulated-industry content pipelines
- Familiarity with integrations across platforms such as Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud, Jira, Asana, Wrike, Google Drive, or Microsoft 365
- Prior experience in a solutions engineering, technical account management, or customer engineering capacity
Please note: Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
- Base salary: $180,000 – $210,000 USD annually
- Early-stage equity commensurate with a founding-team-adjacent role
LOCATION
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. The team works primarily in-office with flexibility to work from home. Expect meaningful time on-site with enterprise customers as part of the core job.