Forward Deployed Engineer

Founding Forward Deployed Engineer | London or Copenhagen

Sit-who?

Situ builds AI tools to speed up the energy transition. Our founders are ex-Palantir forward deployed engineers, and we’re hiring a small first team of engineers who will build the product and work alongside customers making billion-dollar decisions.

Around $4T is spent on infrastructure projects every year, with up to $2T of that financing the energy transition. Behind those projects are investors, developers and advisors relying on slow, document-heavy workflows to make billion-dollar calls that shape the physical world around us.

Situ fixes that. We pair a purpose-built AI platform with engineers who work directly at customer sites, so investors can move at the speed the transition demands.

What the role is

You will be one of our first customer-facing engineers, working directly with the cofounders and customers. The role has two halves:

• You will work with our clients (infrastructure investors, lenders and advisors) and make sure they have what they need to make decisions.
• You will build the platform that produces those outputs.

This is product engineering with the customer in the room. You’ll write production code in our core systems. You’ll also turn a customer’s question into a feature, ship a first version by the end of the week, watch it run on a live deal, and decide what to harden and what to throw away.

The gap between “what does the client need” and “what does the code do” is yours to close.

What you’ll do

• Work with deal teams at infrastructure investors, lenders and their advisors. You’ll set the standard for what genuine partnership with our end users looks like, a commitment so central to the business that it’s in the name.
• Own the output. Situ isn’t “ChatbotAI for Investors” or off-the-shelf SaaS. Our customers rely on workflows built around their specific investment outputs.You make sure the product meets their standards.
• Build the platform. You’ll write code in our core codebase (Python and TypeScript) across retrieval, schemas, evals, parsers and build frontends customers actually use.
• Bring customer insight back to the product. You’ll see what customers really need before anyone else does, and craft the product that will meet their needs.

How we think about AI

AI does a specific job in our product. It takes large piles of PDFs and documents and turns them into clear, usable data. It never decides what happens next. Our workflows are deterministic, and a person always reviews the output. A big part of our work is making that review quick and painless.

Our founders are sceptical about AI and our customers like that about us. We want measured, critical thinkers, not pure AI evangelists. We expect you to use AI tools in your own work – and also to check what they give you.

What we’re looking for

• End-to-end ownership. This matters most to us. You can think through a problem, build the solution and check that it actually works. You ask “is this good enough?” and set your own bar. We’ll of course review each other’s code and challenge each other’s decisions, but the customer-facing nature of this work will require you to work largely autonomously.
• Good customer judgement. You can run a discovery conversation with a managing director, push back when the ask is wrong, and write a follow-up that gets replied to.
• Strong full-stack engineering. Python and TypeScript are preferred, but any strong language works. You write code other engineers want to read, and you’re comfortable across the backend, the data layer, the frontend and infrastructure.
• Real-world LLM experience. You’ve shipped a product into production that uses LLMs to do real work, and you’ve debugged it when it regressed in week six.
• Comfort with ambiguity. You can walk into a customer context on Monday with no playbook and ship something useful by Friday.
• Direct, low-ego communication. You give and take feedback without it becoming a thing.
• 3 to 5+ years of engineering experience, with some of it customer-facing. That might be Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect, technical cofounder, or a Software Engineer who has owned customer outcomes end to end. Experience matters less than ownership and judgement.

You may also have

• An interest in speeding up the energy transition. You don’t need a climate background, but you want your work to matter and to have outcomes you can point to.
• Experience as a founder or in an early-stage environment that taught you how to figure out the difference between an interesting prototype and something a customer will pay for.
• Time at a vertical AI startup or applied AI team where you shipped customer deployments end-to-end. Anthropic, OpenAI, Harvey, Glean and Palantir alumni are all relevant.
• Exposure to energy transition, project finance or infrastructure investing. Even better if you’ve worked with messy financial data and legal documents such as term sheets, SPAs, PPAs, model files and technical reports.

What we offer

• Pay: Competitive, top-of-market salary for London or Copenhagen.
• Equity: A meaningful founding-team grant. Situ is bootstrapped today.
• Benefits: Generous, and they vary by location.

Location and how we work

• We’re based in London and Copenhagen. We’ll also consider people who live somewhere else but can easily get to both.
• Expect to be in the office at least three days a week.
• Expect 30 to 50% travel to be on site with deal teams during live engagements.
• Visa sponsorship is available for qualified candidates.

What the process looks like

• Intro call (45 minutes): To check we’re a good fit for each other. We’ll talk about what you’ve built and what you want to build next.
• Technical deep-dive (60 minutes): We dig into a real system you’ve shipped.
• Paid work trial (1 to 3 days): You work on a scoped problem from a real engagement. If you’re currently employed, we’ll work around that.

If you feel your skills are a good fit for this role and you're excited to build with us, then we welcome your application.

You can also read more about our founding story here https://lnkd.in/p/eG7yHnDK and here https://lnkd.in/p/eFvC9w9A.

We look forward to meeting you.