Forward Deployed Product Engineer, Internal Tools & Automation

Role overview A fast-scaling physical infrastructure organization is hiring an internal product engineer to embed with operators and turn fragmented, manual workflows into reliable systems, integrations, automations, and AI-assisted processes. The role sits within a Digital Operations team focused on Business Systems & Automation and is a hands-on individual contributor position. Early scope centers on the path from customer specifications and orders through sourcing, purchasing, cost tracking, invoicing, and fulfillment, with the goal of producing trustworthy records, faster decisions, fewer reconciliations, and tools that operators actually adopt.

Responsibilities - Discover and document critical operational workflows by working directly with the people who run them, surfacing undocumented rules, exceptions, and ownership gaps. - Define core records, identifiers, lifecycle states, owners, and decision rules that make each workflow reliable. - Use SQL and direct data inspection to reconcile conflicting records, test assumptions, and identify data-quality problems across commercial, operational, procurement, and financial systems. - Map how information moves through business systems, spreadsheets, documents, APIs, and manual handoffs, and identify decision points suited to deterministic automation, AI assistance, or both. - Sequence process changes, integrations, and internal tools into the smallest releases that deliver useful outcomes, then lead rollout, training, migration, and the retirement of workarounds. - Write clear workflow briefs, requirements, data contracts, acceptance criteria, and decision records; measure each release by its effect on cycle time, accuracy, visibility, control, and manual effort.

Requirements - Demonstrated experience owning a cross-functional workflow or internal product from an ambiguous starting point through delivery, adoption, and measurable operating results. - Practical fluency with relational data, including entities, identifiers, joins, grain, one-to-many relationships, lifecycle states, lineage, and data quality. - Ability to write and review SQL to inspect, join, reconcile, and validate operational data. - Working knowledge of APIs, integrations, authentication, events or webhooks, failure handling, and system boundaries. - Strong product judgment, including scoping useful releases, choosing what to build next, and explaining what should wait. - Ability to communicate clearly with frontline operators, functional leaders, and technical teams in a fully remote environment, including when information is incomplete.

Nice to have - Background in procurement, logistics, construction, project delivery, or another physical operating environment. - Familiarity with common business systems such as NetSuite, HubSpot, order-management tools, procurement platforms, or document-based RFQ workflows. - Experience building internal products, data products, enterprise applications, or operational platforms, and retiring spreadsheets after a replacement proves reliable. - Familiarity with role-based access control, auditability, sensitive data, and secure read/write interfaces. - Hands-on experimentation with AI agents and local, hosted, or hybrid model architectures, with a reasoned point of view on permissions, reliability, observability, cost, and maintenance.

Benefits and work setup - Full-time, 100% remote with no recurring office requirement; slight preference for candidates near Austin, Texas. - Occasional travel for company onsites, workflow discovery, or major rollouts. - Subsidized health, dental, and vision insurance. - Equity in a rapidly growing startup and a 401(k) with employer match. - Unlimited paid time off and parental leave. - Healthcare and Dependent Care FSA or HSA, and commuter benefits where applicable.