Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer | Palantir-style FDE at a software holdco backed by the Collisons, General Catalyst & D1 | New York / SF / Toronto (Hybrid) | $185K–$240K base

We've partnered with a new kind of software holding company: one that buys great vertical-market software businesses and holds them permanently, then grows them with agentic AI rather than financial engineering. They recently closed a $250M Series B from an exceptional roster, including General Catalyst, D1 Capital, CPMG, Sator Grove and the family offices of some of tech's most successful founders, among them Patrick and John Collison, Tony Xu, Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh. The founders have done it before: one a former President of Instacart, the other a former Sequoia partner. They run on permanent, committed capital with no pressure to sell, and one clear thesis, scale through software, not headcount.

This is a rare Palantir-style Forward Deployed Engineer role, and the leverage is unusual. You won't write decks. You'll drop into a company that already has customers and revenue, work out which two or three workflows agentic software can genuinely fix, then build it: integrations, prompts, evals, the interface people actually use. You ship it into live operations, tune the autonomy tiers until it runs without anyone hovering, and hand it off clean. Then you write down what you learned, and the next deployment in that vertical goes faster because you did the work first. The difference from selling software is that the customer is a company they own, so if it doesn't work, they feel it directly.

The Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will:

Drop into a portfolio company, learn how it actually runs, earn the operators' trust, and find the two or three highest-leverage workflows for agentic software.

Build the wedge: the integrations, prompts, evals and UI to land the first agentic loop on the core platform.

Operate and tune deployed systems after launch, adjusting autonomy tiers and handing off cleanly once stable.

Act as the technical face to portfolio-company GMs, setting expectations and making the system their leverage.

Bring patterns back to HQ and codify them into playbooks that speed up every future deployment in the vertical.

About You

You have four to six years of experience, with three the absolute floor and we mean it. Big Tech alone won't clear the bar; the strongest profiles pair a recognisable company with real high-growth startup experience.

You have genuine tenure at a startup people have heard of, and stayed long enough to watch your own decisions play out. A string of sub-year stints is the most common reason strong engineers get passed on here.

You can own delivery solo, database through to screen: TypeScript or Python on the backend, React on the frontend, SQL. Specialists get blocked constantly in this role.

You have shipped production LLM or agentic software that external users depended on, with evals, autonomy gating and outcome tracking, not prototypes or demos.

You build with AI dev tools every day and have opinions about them, whether that's Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot or MCP servers. If you don't work this way, the pace will be uncomfortable.

You have operator instincts: you can read a P&L, sit with a GM who has never written code, disagree, be right, and leave with a scoped technical problem.

You are based in or willing to relocate to New York, San Francisco or Toronto, comfortable with at least three days a week in office plus two to three days travelling to portfolio sites. Open to visa transfers including OPT and H-1B, with relocation help.

The interview will ask you to walk through the hardest technical decision you've made: the decision, the option you turned down, and why. Come ready to go three layers into something you built. The team is hiring several engineers and moving quickly. If you want to ship agentic software into live operations and own the outcomes across an entire portfolio, apply now or send your CV directly to will@inventurerecruitment.com.