Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Department: Engineering & Product

Location: Amsterdam

Compensation: €80K – €100K • 0.25% – 0.75%

Employment Type: FullTime

We're building the connective tissue between AI and user data. Today's AI agents are brilliant but mostly blind: they can reason, plan, and execute, but they can't see what's happening across users' work. Every app is a silo. Every database is an island. We're changing that with a focused technical team and great customers, including one of the world's leading AI labs.

Airweave turns scattered information into searchable and learned intelligence. We give agents the context they need by ensuring the right information is available when decisions are made.

The next wave of software will connect dots across systems and work alongside people naturally. That won't come from a bigger model. It will come from the hard work of connecting intelligence to the data in our work and world. We're building the infrastructure to make that possible.

The Role

We're looking for a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to work directly with our most important customers, including one of the world's leading AI labs, and make Airweave work in their environments.

This is not a support role. Forward deployed means you're the bridge between what we've built and what customers actually need. You'll be embedded with enterprise teams, understanding their infrastructure, data sources, and constraints. You'll solve problems that turn into product features.

You'll spend time on-site with enterprises, ship code that solves their specific problems, and ensure Airweave delivers in environments we've never seen before. The work spans Kubernetes, Python, PostgreSQL, and LLM infrastructure, but the real skill is figuring out how it all fits together in a new way.

This is crucial early-stage work. Your work will directly determine how we land and expand in enterprise.

What you'll work on

• Deploy and integrate Airweave into enterprise environments: on-prem, hybrid cloud, air-gapped networks

• Build custom connectors and integrations for customer-specific data sources and workflows

• Debug production issues in real time, often on customer infrastructure

• Work directly with technical teams at customers, including understanding their requirements and constraints

• Translate customer feedback into product improvements; you'll have a direct line to engineering

• Own the technical relationship with key accounts from proof-of-concept through production

• Build the playbooks and tooling that define how Airweave lands in enterprise

• Always free to contribute directly to the Airweave product based on what you learn in the field

• Travel to customer sites across Europe as needed

You might be a fit if

• You're comfortable working directly with customers and can communicate technical concepts clearly at the whiteboard

• You've deployed software in enterprise environments and understand the realities (security reviews, network constraints, compliance)

• You're a strong generalist: comfortable with Python, infrastructure, databases, and whatever else the problem requires

• You thrive in ambiguity and can figure things out without a playbook

• You can debug distributed systems under moderate pressure: logs, traces, intuition, and teamwork

• You're willing to travel and work on-site with customers when needed

Nice to have

• Experience with data/LLM infrastructure deployments

• Background in solutions engineering, technical leadership, or customer-facing technical roles

• Familiarity with enterprise security requirements (SOC 2, GDPR, on-prem deployments)

• French, German, or Dutch language skills

What we offer

• Customers including one of the world's leading AI labs

• Competitive salary (€80K–€100K) with meaningful equity (0.25%–0.75%)

• Health, dental, and vision coverage

• Work in-person in San Francisco with a highly-skilled, technical team

• Direct impact on architecture and infrastructure decisions from the first week

Hiring Process

1. Founders call (45 min) – learn about our vision, share your story.

2. Paid work trial (3 days, on-site) – work on a real problem with the team. You'll get a feel for the codebase, how we collaborate, and whether this is the right fit for both sides. We cover your travel expenses.

3. Offer – we decide fast (usually within 24 hours).

Our Values

The systems we build are made to support real AI infrastructure. They're designed to handle complexity without adding noise, to surface what matters, and to hold up when it counts.

We don't wait for specs or permission. High agency means finding what needs to be done and doing it, whether that's a gnarly bug, a missing abstraction, or a conversation no one wants to have. We zoom out to first principles and zoom in to the details, where the real problems live.

We have bold opinions, loosely held. We say what we think, change our minds when the evidence points somewhere new, and don't pretend to know things we don't. The best idea wins, not the loudest voice.

We bring these values to our product every day.

Join Us

We're a small team tackling a big problem. If you want to work on the systems that thousands of AI agents depend on, ship code that matters, and help define how intelligent software interacts with the world, we'd love to hear from you.

The stack is young. The problems are real. The architecture is yours to shape.