Forward Deployed Engineer

Team: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Workplace Type: onsite

What You’ll Do

Lead end-to-end deployments of Collate’s AI systems inside life sciences organizations — owning scoping, build, and production rollout from first conversation to measurable workflow impact.



Go deep before you write a line of code. Embed with customer teams — medical writers, regulatory affairs, clinical ops — to understand what’s structurally broken, where the highest concentration of unsolved value lives, and what’s actually buildable.



Design and ship production AI systems — document generation agents, agentic workflows, data pipelines — that integrate with customers’ existing infrastructure and regulatory environments.



Define and run eval loops that measure system quality against workflow-specific benchmarks — acceptance criteria, output accuracy, reviewer expectations — and use that signal to improve deployed systems over time.



Turn early wins into repeatable patterns. The best of what you build ships to every Collate customer. What you discover in the field directly shapes what gets built next — you’re a core feedback loop between customers and the product team.

Communicate across every altitude. Translate technical tradeoffs into decisions and operating procedures for scientific, regulatory, and executive audiences — and bring that clarity back to Collate’s engineering and product teams.

What We’re Looking For

You’ve owned customer-facing AI deployments end-to-end — from scoping through production adoption — and can point to shipped systems that drove measurable workflow impact.



You have a 0-to-1 build track record. You’ve built production software from scratch in ambiguous environments and moved fast enough to learn — not just prototype.



You have hands-on production AI experience: prompt engineering, agent development, evaluation frameworks, and deployment at scale — not just familiarity with the landscape.



You’ve operated as a senior engineer or tech lead trusted to make technical decisions in ambiguous environments — without needing a defined spec or a clear path.



You communicate clearly across every altitude — as comfortable in a strategic discussion with a CTO as you are deep in a codebase, and able to translate tradeoffs into decisions for non-technical stakeholders.



Bonus: you have context in life sciences, regulated industries, or document-heavy workflows — and understand what it means to build for auditability, compliance, and high-stakes review cycles.



You think like a founder. When you walk into a customer, you’re curious about the business, digging into what’s broken, and figuring out what to build that doesn’t yet exist. You’re scrappy, resourceful, and want to do it at a higher level of ambition.