Forward Deployed Engineer

Role overview

This role embeds an engineer directly inside small businesses for roughly eight-week engagements to map real operations, build the tooling that removes repeated work, train a client's team, and hand everything off before moving on. The work sits at the intersection of consulting and production engineering, focused on the long tail of small and mid-sized operations where most of the work lives off-system. The position is remote-first with US-timezone overlap and roughly one day per week spent on a client site.

Responsibilities

- Shadow working teams and document the real process, including undocumented steps and quiet workarounds - Quantify each repeated step by frequency, time, and loaded labor cost, and recommend against automation that does not pay back - Build production tools against the client's real data and systems, directing agentic tooling and reviewing every line it writes - Train a named non-technical contact on the client's side to run what was built without further help - Generalize at least one tool per engagement back into the broader product catalog - Stay accountable post-handoff as the primary point of contact if something breaks

Requirements

- Production software engineering in Python and/or TypeScript at a level where unfamiliar codebases feel routine - Hands-on experience putting LLM-backed systems into production, including prompting, evaluation, retrieval, and agent design, plus awareness of where each approach fails - Ability to hold a technical conversation and a business conversation in the same room without condescension to either - Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward shipping something small within the week - Willingness to travel roughly one day a week and to operate as the outsider inside someone else's business

Nice to have

- Direct or adjacent experience in a small business environment such as trades, restaurants, retail, logistics, or distribution - Prior forward-deployed, solutions-engineering, or field-consulting background - Spanish language ability

Benefits and work setup

- Remote-first with US-timezone overlap and approximately one day of client-site travel per week - Base salary of $130,000 to $165,000 plus 0.4% to 1.0% equity