Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Role overview An early growth-stage AI company that turns utility inspection imagery into operational intelligence is hiring its first Forward Deployed Engineer. The role is a hands-on technical partner embedded with customers, sales, product, and core engineering, spending roughly 80% of time customer-facing across pre-sales scoping and deployment and 20% building reusable deployment tooling and AI agents. The position reports to the CTO and exists to move enterprise pilots into production quickly while turning field patterns into product leverage.

Responsibilities - Join sales discovery calls, size implementation effort, run pilots against the customer's own imagery and assets, and clear technical objections through architecture, security, and data-handling review. - Own deployments end to end: configuration, integration, validation, and handoff inside regulated utility environments. - Build the integrations that connect the visual AI platform to asset management, GIS, inspection data pipelines, and reporting tools, using AI workflows to compress delivery. - Spot and scope expansion opportunities inside existing accounts and hand sales a qualified, technically validated next use case. - Translate recurring field patterns into reusable deployment capabilities and clear product and engineering requirements rather than one-off escalations. - Ship internal deployment tooling and AI agents that make each rollout faster.

Requirements - 6+ years in solutions engineering, forward deployed engineering, implementation, or professional services at a technical product company, with hands-on keyboard ownership of customer outcomes. - Pre-sales experience partnering with account executives through technical discovery, scoping before signature, and acting as the trusted technical voice in the room. - Strong Python or TypeScript and fluency integrating third-party systems via APIs, webhooks, and data pipelines. - Hands-on experience building with LLMs and agentic systems, including prompting, tool use, retrieval, orchestration, and evaluation, with something agentic shipped to real users. - Enterprise credibility navigating security review and architecture scrutiny, plus comfort with ambiguity and excellent communication across technical and operational audiences. - Willingness to travel roughly 40% of the time for customer sites and team onsites.

Nice to have - Background in utilities, energy, or another regulated industry with long enterprise sales cycles. - Familiarity with computer vision, geospatial data, or large-scale imagery pipelines. - Experience as the first or earliest technical hire in a forward deployed, customer engineering, or implementation function. - Background in revenue operations or internal tooling that earned sustained adoption.

Benefits and work setup - US work authorization sponsorship is not available for this role.