Forward Deployed Engineer

Role OverviewMost engineering roles sit behind a product roadmap. You'll help define it. Most customer-facing roles don't ship code. You will.You're part engineer, part product, fully customer-obsessed. You'll work closely with our hotel and hospitality customers, understand their hardest operational problems, and build solutions directly within Akia to solve them. Then you'll bring what you learn back to our core team to make Akia smarter for everyone.About AkiaAkia is the AI agent for hospitality. Operators don't buy her; they hire her. She handles guest communication, drives direct bookings, manages upsells, and runs the full guest journey from welcome to welcome back. From slope-side vacation rentals to 500-room oceanfront resorts where every guest expects to feel like the only one, she shows up, learns the property, and gets to work.We're building the agent that runs modern hospitality. We're still early, and there's a lot left to build.What you'll doYou'll be the person our most strategic hotel groups and management companies turn to when they need Akia to do something she doesn't do yet, or doesn't do well enough. You'll spend time understanding their operations, their staff, their guests, and their goals.Before you write a line of code, you'll define what success looks like and why it matters. You can take an ambiguous customer problem and turn it into a clear, scoped solution with a business case behind it. You think in outcomes, not features.You'll design and ship features, workflows, integrations, and new capabilities that extend what Akia can do. You’ll be shipping code.You'll translate customer needs into product insights that shape what Akia learns and does next, and translate her AI capabilities into language hospitality professionals actually understand.You'll partner closely with Customer Success to ensure long-term adoption, Engineering to scope and build, and occasionally Sales to help close deals where technical depth matters.What we're looking for5-8 years of software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping production-quality codeComfortable across the stack: frontend, backend, APIs, dataAI fluency: you understand how LLMs work, know when to use them, and have built with them before (RAG pipelines, agent orchestration, prompt engineering, any or all)Experience working with third-party APIs and integrations; bonus if you've worked with PMS systemsYou're comfortable with ambiguity and know how to make customers feel confident even when you're still figuring things outCompensation & BenefitsSalary: $140,000 - $190,000 base, depending on experienceEquity / stock optionsFull health, dental, and vision coverageCommuter benefits401kPTO