Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

About Sylvan

Sylvan is building autonomous revenue teams.

We help B2B companies grow and protect revenue from their existing customers by identifying revenue-driving signals and deploying agents that act on them at the exact moment, across every account. We work with customers ranging from fast-growth startups to Fortune 500 enterprises like ServiceNow. Our ambition is to power the top-line of the economy.

We are guided by a core principle: no assholes, high mutual respect. We operate at high intensity, but with deep respect. Direct, honest, and no egos — just a shared obsession to win.

We’ve raised $10M+ from world-class investors and strategics including TQ Ventures and HubSpot Ventures. We are a fully in-office company based in New York City.

We will only hire A-players and are highly willing to go above-market in ownership, equity, and cash compensation. We want world-class builders who are excited by the opportunity to be part of a category-defining company at the earliest stage. It won’t be easy. We’re going to move fast. But, it’ll be fun.

The Role

Every customer's data warehouse is a mess in its own way. Tables nobody documented, three competing definitions of ARR, and a data team with an hour a week to give you. Our agents only work if that mess gets resolved into a clean representation of the business — and until it is, nothing built on top of it is trustworthy.

That's this job. You own the customer instance end to end: scoping data access, exploring the warehouse, mapping a chaotic schema onto real business concepts, standing up the ontology, building the signals on top of it, and proving the workflows moved something both sides agree on. You're customer-facing throughout and you report into engineering.

What You’ll Do

• Onboard new customers end to end. Scope data access, explore the warehouse with no documentation, and map a chaotic schema onto real business concepts.

• Stand up the ontology and own the gate before it. Interview the customer's data team and business owners, resolve their own inconsistent definitions, and validate the mapping before anything gets built on top of it.

• Build the signals on top of it. The predictions and workflows the customer actually sees.

• Define and measure success for each deployment. Agree the number with the customer up front, then report it back honestly whether or not it moved.

• Make the next deployment faster. Validation frameworks, eval harnesses, mapping accelerators — what you learn at one customer ships as tooling rather than tribal knowledge.

What You’ll Bring

• 3+ years in a technical, customer-facing role (forward deployed, solutions, or software engineering with heavy customer exposure); former founders strongly encouraged

• Deep data warehouse fluency. SQL, dbt, and real comfort in an undocumented five-year-old schema with nobody left to ask.

• You can sit with a customer's data or ops team, extract what a business concept actually means to them, resolve the cases where their own people disagree, and encode it.

• Applied data science literacy. Distributions, seasonality, validation design, calibration. You know when a result is noise.

• Painstaking through to the artifact. You'll chase a broken join for three hours because a number looked slightly off, and you'll care as much about whether the customer can actually interpret the output. Correct data in an unreadable form isn't delivered.

• You define success metrics rather than report on them. You can tell a customer their number didn't move and why.

• You hold a technical position under pushback from a customer or from us, and change your mind for evidence rather than authority.

• Production fluency with agent-driven development — Claude Code or equivalent as your default working mode

• High tolerance for ambiguity and unglamorous work. Based in NYC, excited to be in-office.

Equal Opportunity

Sylvan is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the hiring process - please let us know if you need any.