Forward Deployed Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: Chicago

Compensation: $150K – $180K • Offers Equity • 5% match on 401(k)

Employment Type: FullTime

• Endeavor is real-world enterprise AI.

AI models are improving faster than most companies can put them to work. Endeavor closes that gap.

We exist to secure American industrial leadership. AI is the largest advantage available to the companies that make, move, and defend things in this country, and most of them can't reach it alone. We close that distance — so their customers pay less, their people do work worth doing, and the companies themselves come out stronger than the competition abroad.

To do that, we build custom AI systems for companies in mission-critical industries — manufacturing, distribution, supply chain, defense, life sciences. Not software they rent from a vendor that doesn't understand their business. Systems they own, built inside their own stack, in production in weeks.

Operating Principles

• One team, one fight. Small companies fail for a hundred reasons. Being internally misaligned shouldn't be one of them. We think like owners of the whole business — the question is always how we win. We're fighting the world, not each other.

• Strong convictions, loosely held. Show up with a point of view and hold that view loosely enough that better evidence can move it. The best ideas come from candor and debate.

• Default to open. Our clients trust us with their hardest problems and we extend that same trust internally. Information here is open by default — data, context, the reasoning behind decisions — because you can't own an outcome you can only see half of.
  

The Role | Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineers work side by side with our customers. They quickly get to the bottom of the customer’s hardest problems, then architect and build solutions that use business-critical data and the latest advances in AI to solve them. At this level, you’ll lead engagements from the first conversation through to production. That means scoping the problem with customer stakeholders, making the key technical calls, and shipping systems that hold up in mission-critical environments. You’ll work in small, agile teams, own the end-to-end delivery of high-stakes projects, and help raise the bar for the engineers around you.

What We Require

• High agency and chaos ceiling, with strong first-principles thinking, outcome orientation, and resiliency.

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of taking projects from an ambiguous problem to production.

• Proficiency with one or more programming languages, such as Python, C++, TypeScript/JavaScript, or similar.

• Comfort working directly with customers and turning business problems into technical solutions.

• An engineering background, ideally in Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics, or Data Science.

• Ability to travel.