Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer - Bootstrapped Startup with a team of 40.$180,000 base ($240k - $600k OTE)Every business over a billion in revenue is currently asking the same question: what does this company look like if AI does half the work in five years? Most don't know how to answer it. That's why they call our client.They embed elite teams directly into client operations, find the bets that actually move the business, and ship the work that makes those companies AI-native. They're formal partners with the two leading frontier labs and sit in the room with their applied AI teams on real client problems.They hire for high agency and high urgency, and care far more about what you've built than where you trained.The roleStrategists scope and prioritise the bets. Forward Deployed Engineers make them real.You're the engineer who walks into a client codebase and ships the AI workflow that changes how thousands of people do their job. The architecture decisions are yours. The code is yours. The credit and the consequences are yours.Expect to travel to client sites roughly once a month.What you'll doOwn features end to end. Architecture, implementation, deploy, and the relationship with the client engineer reviewing your PR. Nothing gets handed off.Use every agentic coding tool that gives you leverage. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, whatever ships next week. Throughput is measured, and your pay scales with it.Ramp into unfamiliar codebases fast. Sometimes a Fortune 500 monolith in a language you haven't touched in years. Sometimes a stack built last quarter. You get productive without hand-holding.Design agent systems that are reliable, auditable, and keep humans in the loop where they belong.Make the team better. Workflow refinements you find on one engagement get adopted across every other one. Your wins compound.What you'll bring2–6 years building and shipping production software end to end, with a track record of turning complex problems into clean, scalable systemsAI as a core part of how you work - you use agentic coding tools to raise both the quality and the throughput of everything you shipOperational discipline. Parallel workstreams across multiple clients without losing clarity or qualityCollaborative rigour. You hold yourself and others to a high standard and make the people around you more effectiveBonus points: public artifacts of your work (open source, a side project people actually use, a talk or post on applied AI engineering that landed), or experience shipping a production agentic system end to end - not a POC.Compensation & benefits$180,000 guaranteed base, with uncapped cash variable on top. Variable pay scales directly with measured output, paid quarterly. Engineers in good standing earn significantly above base.Comprehensive medical (PPO and HSA options), dental and visionHSA, Healthcare FSA and commuter benefits100% employer-paid life insurance + AD&D, and long-term disabilityResponsible PTOWorkplaceFive days a week, in person, from the New York City office. The bet is that the best ideas come from being in the same room.