Forward Deployed Engineer (Founding)

The opportunity to solve a problem that exists across nearly every business on earth. A well-backed, traction-proven AI startup that is scaling at an exceptional rate A founding technical role at the intersection of engineering and customer impact before the playbook exists Codesearch AI are delighted to be assisting this startup in their search for a Forward Deployed Engineer. You’ll embed directly with customers, build production-grade AI agents, and own the full technical journey from onboarding to a live, self-improving system. Our client has built a solution pointed at a problem that is resonating with 100s of customers in a very short time frame. The time to impact is clear and they are set to grow very quickly indeed. What You'll Be Doing Owning the full technical deployment lifecycle - from customer onboarding through to a live, production-grade AI running 24/7 Deeply understanding each customer's product, personas, and objections, then translating that into configured, tuned and continuously improving solution. Building and iterating through the platform's tooling, designing eval frameworks to measure and improve conversation quality Monitoring performance, identifying failure patterns, and retraining weekly to drive continuous improvement Serving as the primary technical point of contact for customers - fast, clear, and trusted Feeding real-world deployment insights directly back to the founding team; you will be the sharpest signal in the company on what's working Helping to define how this function scales - as an early FDE, you'll have the influence to build the playbook others will follow What You'll Need 3–6 years of software engineering experience, with a meaningful portion in customer-facing or deployment-focused roles - solutions engineering, professional services, technical account management, or forward deployed engineering Hands-on experience with LLM orchestration frameworks, vector databases, RAG pipelines, and prompt engineering - you understand the stack well enough to configure, debug, and improve without needing a dedicated engineer beside you Experience building and deploying agentic AI applications in production; eval frameworks and iterative model improvement are part of your standard workflow Solid experience with cloud platforms - AWS preferred, GCP or Azure also considered - and API integration patterns Familiarity with SQL and database fundamentals; comfortable working with enterprise data environments Proven ability to work directly with customers - you can run a technical discovery session, present to a non-technical founder, and manage a complex comms thread simultaneously Comfort operating in ambiguity - you define the problem as you go and build toward clarity rather than waiting for a perfect spec A bias for action - you ship, learn, and iterate rather than over-engineer before you've seen the customer The Role Full-time, based in San Francisco - 5 days in office Salary & Equity - competitive Visa sponsorship not available; H1B transfers welcome Person You are an engineer who leans into customers and solutions, not away from them. You find the translation problem - taking a messy real-world business problem and turning it into a solution - more interesting than any purely internal build. You want to see your work live, running, and improving in production within days of starting a new engagement. #J-18808-Ljbffr