Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

New York City · On-site · Full-time
Compensation: $180K–$250K base + competitive equity

About the Company

Our client is a well-funded, seed-stage AI company building the revenue execution platform for B2B enterprises. Their product pairs LLMs with structured customer data to tell post-sales teams which accounts to prioritize, why, and what to do next, automating work that account management and customer success teams have long done by hand. They are already live with Fortune 500 customers and have meaningful contracted revenue.

Founded 2025 · Small founding team · Industry: AI, B2B, Enterprise

The Role

As the first Forward Deployed Engineer, you will own the technical deployment of the platform into enterprise customer environments. You will sit between messy customer data warehouses and production agent workflows, turning each customer's business knowledge into verified data models that drive measurable revenue outcomes. You will work directly with the founding team and report to the CTO.

What you'll be doing

• Leading new customer onboardings from start to finish: scoping data access, exploring undocumented warehouses, and mapping complex schemas to business concepts like churn, expansion, and ARR
• Building and validating the semantic layer by working with customer stakeholders, reconciling conflicting definitions, and encoding them as verified SQL
• Deploying workflows and agent pipelines into customer instances, then monitoring them to make sure they deliver results
• Running 2–3 customer engagements at a time in shared channels with customer data and engineering teams (roughly a quarter of your time customer-facing, the rest hands-on data work)
• Using the internal agent tooling daily and shaping how the team improves evals, validation, and the agent harness

Tech stack: SQL, dbt, data warehousing, Python, LLMs, AI agents, signal engineering, eval frameworks

Requirements

• 2–5 years in a forward deployed, data science, or customer-facing engineering role
• A track record of personally leading technical customer deployments, including data access, schema mapping, stakeholder alignment, and demonstrating value
• Experience building and shipping production data pipelines or systems on your own, from writing the code through debugging and deployment
• Strong SQL and data warehouse skills, including working confidently in poorly documented or legacy schemas and producing output you have validated yourself
• A daily AI-first workflow: you use tools like Claude or Cursor and have built or tailored your own agent-based workflows
• Solid applied statistics sense, such as understanding distributions, seasonality, and validation design, and knowing when a result is noise
• A background along one of these paths: forward deployed, customer, or solutions engineering at a leading data or AI company; analytics engineering or data science followed by customer-facing delivery; or consulting, PE, or banking paired with a genuine CS and engineering foundation
• The confidence to hold a technical position when customers push back, while staying open to changing your mind based on evidence
• Comfort with detailed, repetitive data verification, which makes up most of the role
• A bachelor's degree in computer science, data science, statistics, or another quantitative STEM field from a top-tier university
• Based in or willing to relocate to New York City and work in the office five days a week

Nice to Haves

• Experience at an early-stage startup (seed through Series B); large tech company experience is most relevant when combined with startup or founder experience

Why Join

• Join as a founding engineer at a company that already has real enterprise traction and strong investor backing
• Above-market base salary plus meaningful equity, with flexibility for exceptional candidates
• Own the most important technical path in the business, since every customer deployment runs through this role
• Attack a large, underserved market in post-sales execution with one of the first purpose-built platforms
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family, parental leave, a monthly wellness stipend, daily lunches, flexible vacation, and up to $10K in relocation support for out-of-state hires

Details

• Location: New York City, NY
• Work policy: On-site 5 days a week
• Compensation: $180,000–$250,000 + equity
• Visa sponsorship: Open to visa transfers (e.g. OPT, H-1B transfers)
• Employment type: Full-time