Forward Deployed Engineer

Department: Portfolio Companies

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Role

You'll work directly with our largest customers to solve their most critical problems – then ship the solutions yourself. This is a technical role with significant customer exposure, sitting at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer success.

Forward Deployed Engineers are the bridge between what customers need and what the product can do. You'll spend time on-site or deeply embedded with customers, understanding their workflows, pain points, and requirements. Then you'll come back and build, shipping features, integrations, and customizations that unlock value. The best FDEs develop deep domain expertise and become trusted advisors to customers.

This role is ideal for engineers who want customer exposure, founders whose companies didn't work out but want to stay close to the market, or anyone who believes great products come from deep customer understanding. You'll have more context on customer needs than almost anyone in the company, and you'll use that context to shape what we build.

What You'll Do

• Partner with enterprise customers to understand requirements, scope projects, and expand into new use cases

• Build and ship features, integrations, and customizations that solve specific customer problems (you will probably write code for customer-specific integrations, proof of concepts, and implementations).

• Own the full cycle from customer problem identification through technical solution to production deployment

• Develop deep domain expertise in customer workflows, troubleshoot issues in customer environments, and become a trusted technical advisor

• Translate customer feedback and requirements into product roadmap inputs and feature requests

• Collaborate with sales and core engineering to help prioritize what matters most to revenue, improve workflows and systems, and ship larger product initiatives informed by customer needs

• Create technical documentation, training materials, and implementation guides for customers

• Support customer onboarding and ensure successful adoption of new features

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software engineering experience with strong coding skills in Python, TypeScript, or similar

• Experience in a customer-facing technical GTM role: FDE, solutions engineer, technical consultant, or similar

• Ability to context-switch between building and selling, comfortable in both writing production-quality code and customer meetings

• Strong communication skills with ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders

• Experience with enterprise software, integrations, or building on top of existing customer systems

• Comfort with ambiguity and ability to scope and execute projects with minimal direction

• Track record of shipping production code and delivering measurable customer outcomes

• Willingness to travel for customer engagements (typically 20-40%)

Nice to Have

• Previous experience as an FDE at Palantir, solutions engineer at Scale AI, or similar customer-facing technical GTM role

• Background as a technical founder or early startup engineer

• Domain expertise in financial services, legal, healthcare, or other enterprise SaaS verticals

• Experience with AI/ML systems, data pipelines, or analytics infrastructure

• Consulting background with technical implementation experience

• Experience at a company selling into enterprise customers with complex requirements