Company Description
CandorIQ is a Series A-stage company (YC-backed) software company that offers a unified platform designed to manage headcount spend and compensation planning. Our platform helps organizations win and retain top talent by ensuring operational excellence in compensation management. By leveraging expert-backed and data-packed insights, we assist in hiring and retaining top talent efficiently. Our platform provides capabilities in headcount budgeting and approvals, pay and compensation strategy, managed merit cycles, global benchmarking data, and hiring and offer generation.
Role Description
This is a full-time remote role based in one of the states we currently operate in: California, New York, Texas, Massachusetts, Washington state, Colorado, or Georgia.
We're looking for a Forward-Deployed Engineer to embed directly with customers and build the custom integrations, scripts, and tools that make CandorIQ work seamlessly inside their systems. This is a hands-on engineering role: you'll write code to solve real customer problems, build internal tools and AI-powered workflows to scale your own impact, and feed what you learn in the field directly back into our product and engineering roadmap.
Design, build, and maintain custom integrations between CandorIQ and customer systems (HRIS, payroll, SSO, SFTP, APIs, and third-party tools like Finch), writing production-quality scripts and code where the platform doesn't yet have a native solution.
- Embed directly with customers during onboarding and beyond, working hands-on inside their environment to resolve complex data, access, and configuration issues that go beyond standard support.
- Build and maintain internal tools and automations, including AI-powered tools and agents, to manage workload more efficiently, streamline case management, and cut down time spent on repetitive work.
- Evaluate and prototype new AI use cases: test tools and approaches, measure their accuracy and impact, and roll the ones that work into standard workflows.
- Write scripts and queries (SQL, Python, or similar) to diagnose and resolve data issues, validate migrations, and build one-off solutions for customer edge cases.
- Partner closely with Engineering and Product, feeding field learnings and recurring pain points directly into the roadmap, and contributing code or fixes for issues you discover in the field.
- Serve as the deepest technical resource for the Customer Success team, taking on escalations that require custom engineering rather than configuration.
- Configure advanced platform capabilities (custom formulas, custom fields, compensation logic) for customers with complex requirements.
- Document technical solutions, patterns, and playbooks so they can be reused across customers and eventually productized.
What You Bring
- 2-3 years of experience as a software engineer, solutions engineer, or forward-deployed engineer focused on HR Tech or Fin Tech solutions.
- Strong coding and scripting ability (Python, SQL, or similar) and comfort working directly with APIs, data pipelines, and integration platforms.
- Hands-on experience building or working with AI tools and agents, and using them to build internal tooling, automate workflows, or evaluate new use cases.
- Experience setting up or troubleshooting integrations: SFTP, APIs, or third-party tools like Finch.
- Comfortable working directly with customer data: reading logs, tracing data flow issues, and building custom fixes rather than workarounds.
- Excellent communicator who can work directly with customer technical stakeholders as well as internal Engineering and Product teams.
- A bias toward building: you'd rather write a script or tool to solve a recurring problem than solve it manually each time.
- Comfortable in a fast-paced startup environment, embedded with customers and switching context often.
Bonus Points
- Experience with HRIS, payroll, or compensation systems
- Familiarity with Finch, n8n/Zapier, or similar integration/iPaaS platforms
- Experience building AI agents, prompt pipelines, or evaluation frameworks (e.g., with Claude, OpenAI APIs, or similar)
- Experience in an early-stage, high-growth startup environment
Why Join Us?
- Opportunity to work on innovative projects in a collaborative and supportive environment
- Competitive salary and benefits package
- Seasoned founders, strong team, growing 5x year over year
- Unlimited PTO
Salary range: $100,000-$125,000 depending on experience and location plus pre-IPO equity.
(Note our limitations: US-based candidates only, in one of the states we currently operate in — California, New York, Texas, Massachusetts, Washington state, Colorado, or Georgia. No visa or citizenship sponsorship. No recruiting agency outreach.)