Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

This is a founding-level, high-impact role at a seed-stage AI SaaS company that automates marketing and packaging content review for large, regulated enterprises. The product is live and expanding with marquee enterprise customers — the company is firmly past validation and into scaling.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), you'll sit at the intersection of customers, product, and engineering. You'll go on-site with enterprise accounts, run deep discovery, and ship working solutions against real workflows — often within days. You'll work directly alongside the founding team in live enterprise sales and expansion cycles, and the signal you bring back shapes what gets built next. This is a builder's role with a strong customer-facing edge.

What You'll Do

• Customer discovery: Go on-site with enterprise customers, ask the questions that uncover unmet needs (not just stated ones), and distinguish what's genuinely worth solving from what isn't.

• POC execution: Configure and ship against real customer workflows. Write code, build integrations, and help customers realize value fast — before the week is out.

• Product signal: Translate field learnings into actionable product requirements. Identify patterns across customers, help prioritize the roadmap, and bring structured insight back to engineering in a form they can act on.

• Stakeholder credibility: Build trust across engineering, design, sales, and customer leadership without direct authority. Be the external face of the product — clear enough for a CMO, deep enough for a technical lead.

• Product partnership: Work closely with founders, product, and engineering to shape roadmap decisions and ensure what gets built is grounded in real customer needs.

What We're Looking For

Requirements:

• 7+ years of professional experience in software engineering, forward deployed engineering, or a closely related technical role

• Demonstrated track record of career progression and promotions

• Minimum 2-year average tenure across roles

• Startup experience strongly preferred; candidates with deep CPG or regulated-industry experience will also be considered

• Comfortable writing code and picking up whatever the job requires — you ship, you don't hand off

• Experience helping build products from 0→1 and converting customer feedback into product direction

• Strong instincts for customer needs; able to distinguish what people say they need from what they actually need

• Confident communicator with enterprise stakeholders at all levels, from IC to C-suite

Nice to have:

• Experience with marketing tech, compliance workflows, or regulated-industry content pipelines

• Familiarity with integrations across platforms such as Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud, Jira, Asana, Wrike, Google Drive, or Microsoft 365

• Prior experience in a solutions engineering, technical account management, or customer engineering capacity

Please note: Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary: $180,000 – $210,000 USD annually

• Early-stage equity commensurate with a founding-team-adjacent role

Location

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. The team works primarily in-office with flexibility to work from home. Expect meaningful time on-site with enterprise customers as part of the core job.