Forward Deployed Engineer

About unPLUG Dining

unPLUG Dining is an AI-powered digital growth platform that helps restaurant brands grow first-party revenue, increase guest lifetime value, and unify guest data across channels. As a vendor-agnostic orchestration layer, we connect ordering, loyalty, marketing, and analytics into one decision-ready system, turning digital ordering into personalized guest experiences across web, mobile, and in-store.

We build and run first-party apps, loyalty programs, payment integrations, marketing tools, and a Customer Data Platform for enterprise restaurant brands in the US.

About the role

Forward Deployed Engineer · Istanbul, Türkiye · Full-time, Hybrid · Development

We're hiring our first dedicated Forward Deployed Engineer. You'll be the engineer our restaurant brand partners work with every week: you take their integrations, launches, production issues, and requests from first message to resolved in production.

Until now, every engineer at unPLUG carried this work on top of product development. As our brand portfolio grows, the last mile needs a dedicated owner. You'll act like a technical lead for each brand you support, and you'll turn what you learn in the field into tooling and product so the next brand launches faster.

This is a hands-on engineering role, not a pre-sales or account management role. You write and ship production code every week.

What you'll do

Integrations

• Build, configure, and maintain integrations with POS, ordering, payments, loyalty, and marketing partners (APIs, webhooks, data syncs)
• Own integration health: monitoring, alerting, reconciliation, and fixing data mismatches before a brand notices them

Deployments

• Lead brand launches and rollouts end to end: configuration, environment setup, app builds and store releases, data migrations, go-live checklists, and post-launch hypercare
• Coordinate across Mobile, Web, Platform, Dashboard, and Design so every launch runs as one plan with one owner

Customer support

• Own the FDE triage queue: reproduce, debug, and resolve production issues across apps, payments, loyalty, and data pipelines within SLA
• Find root causes using Sentry, CloudWatch, ClickHouse, and logs, then fix the issue yourself or route it with a clear write-up
• Build AI-assisted support workflows that triage, answer, and resolve common issues automatically

Client requests

• Be the technical point of contact in weekly calls with brand IT and Marketing teams
• Turn requests into clear scopes: what's needed, how big it is, and whether it's a configuration change, a one-off, or a product feature
• Ship small requests yourself and hand larger ones to product teams with a crisp brief

Make the next brand easier

• Turn repeated work into tooling, templates, runbooks, and self-serve admin features
• Bring what you see in the field back into the roadmap

What we're looking for

• Strong engineering fundamentals and hands-on experience shipping and supporting production systems that real customers depend on
• Integration experience: REST APIs, webhooks, OAuth, idempotency, retries, and mapping data between systems that don't agree
• Strong production debugging: you read logs and traces, write SQL, and work from symptom to root cause without a runbook
• Backend depth in Python, plus enough React or Flutter to work across the stack when an issue crosses layers
• Clear communication with non-technical stakeholders: you explain trade-offs simply, write crisp updates, and can say "not yet" with an alternative
• Ownership through resolution: you stay calm under pressure and close the loop with the customer
• Product-minded engineering: you can tell a one-off request from a pattern, and you push patterns into the product
• AI-native workflow: you use AI to move faster while keeping independent judgment, quality, and correctness
• Fluent written and spoken English; our brand partners are in the US

Note on seniority: We care less about years on paper and more about ambition, ownership, and talent. AI has changed the baseline; strong engineers adapt quickly, validate rigorously, and ship impactful work.

Nice to have

• Restaurant tech experience: POS, online ordering, or loyalty platforms (for example Toast, Square, Olo, Thanx, Punchh)
• Payments integrations and reconciliation
• Mobile release operations: App Store Connect, Google Play, Firebase, Apple and Google Wallet passes
• AWS (Lambda, SQS, Fargate) and Terraform
• Prior experience as an FDE, solutions engineer, support engineer, or in professional services
• Building LLM-powered tools or agents for support or operations
• Bonus: Opus lover 😄

Tech stack: Python (Flask, FastAPI), Go, React, Flutter, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Redis, AWS (Lambda, Fargate, SQS, CloudWatch), Terraform, Sentry, Firebase, CI/CD

What success looks like

• First 30 days: You know our product surface and integrations, own the triage queue for your first brands, resolve production issues end to end, and join weekly customer calls.
• By 90 days: You've led at least one brand launch or major integration from kickoff to go-live, you run customer calls for your brands, issues are resolved within SLA, and at least one runbook or automation has removed repeated manual work.
• By 180 days: Brands see you as their technical owner, repeated requests have become self-serve or product features, and product engineers spend noticeably less time on interrupt-driven support.

How we work

• High trust, high ownership: you own your brands and are accountable for their reliability in production
• Fast iteration cycles with direct customer feedback
• AI-native by default: execution is faster, judgment matters more

Why unPLUG

• Real ownership: end-to-end responsibility for the brands and integrations you support
• Visible impact: your work reaches real guests and enterprise restaurant partners the same week you ship it
• Serious engineering problems: POS, payments, loyalty, marketing, and data integrations under real constraints
• Shape the role: you're our first dedicated FDE, so you'll define how this function works
• High-trust team: low bureaucracy, fast shipping, high standards

Location and schedule

• Istanbul, hybrid: 3 to 4 days a week in person
• Our brand partners are in the US, so this role needs regular overlap with US business hours (Istanbul afternoons and some evenings) on a predictable support schedule