Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA; Toronto, Canada

Department: 140 Applied AI

About the Role

Forward Deployed Engineers are our zero-to-one team. You embed directly with portfolio companies, understand their domain deeply, and solve the novel, high-stakes problems that turn legacy operations into AI-native businesses. You're here to break the back of hard problems, prove transformation hypotheses, and extract generalizable patterns that become platform across our entire portfolio.

Each acquisition is a new deployment. You'll inherit complex workflows, fragmented data, and skeptical operators. Your job is to ship working AI systems that deliver measurable business outcomes - then codify what worked into playbooks that accelerate every future acquisition

What you will do

Portfolio Company Embedding & Domain Mastery

• Embed on-site with newly acquired companies to deeply understand their business, workflows, and pain points
• Sit with end users—operators, managers, frontline staff—to understand adoption blockers and build trust
• Pick genuinely high-stakes problems at the core of the business, not peripheral edge cases

Zero-to-One Delivery

• Build highly scalable, data-driven platforms that connect to legacy IT systems
• Build AI-powered applications leveraging cutting-edge LLMs—voice agents, workflow automation, intelligent assistants
• Define the software architecture and code the product, applying ML as a major differentiator
• Implement eval-driven development: every piece of LLM-written code isn't done until you have evals verifying efficacy

Trust-Building & Adoption

• Build guardrails that protect against runtime failures while maintaining flexibility
• Technical solutions are only half the battle—driving adoption through demonstrated reliability is the other half

Playbook Development & Product Extraction

• Identify patterns across portfolio companies that can become reusable frameworks or platform products
• Contribute to transformation playbooks that reduce time-to-value for each subsequent acquisition
• Work with product teams to graduate successful solutions from bespoke implementations to scalable product

What we look for

• BSc. or MSc. in Computer Science or comparable degree
• At least 5 years of hands-on coding experience as a full-stack or backend-heavy engineer
• Exceptional problem-solving abilities, effective communication, and teamwork skills
• Comfort with ambiguity—you can walk into a newly acquired company with legacy systems and make order from chaos

Core Engineering Craft

• Ship production systems, not just prototypes—you've taken things from zero to deployed
• Comfortable across the stack, but depth in at least one area (backend, frontend, data)
• Experience integrating with legacy systems, messy APIs, and undocumented data sources
• Strong debugging instincts—you can diagnose problems in systems you didn't build

AI/LLM Systems

• Hands-on experience building with LLMs—prompting, RAG, agents, tool use
• Eval-driven development mindset: you instinctively think "how do I measure if this is working?" Whether it’s on data, tests, or dollars.
• Understanding of when to use determinism vs. probabilistic approaches—LLMs for nuance, hard rules for things that must be right 100% of the time

Domain Learning & Systems Thinking

• Ability to rapidly learn new industries—you've gone deep on domains outside your background
• Experience mapping complex business workflows and identifying high-leverage intervention points
• Comfort with ambiguity: you can walk into a messy environment and create structure
• Pattern recognition: you spot what's generalizable vs. one-off

Communication & Trust-Building

• Experience working directly with end users to drive adoption—not just shipping, but getting people to actually use what you build.
• Ability to translate between technical teams and business stakeholders
• Comfort presenting to executives and explaining trade-offs in non-technical terms

Bonus Points

• Experience in a similar role, early-stage startups, or technical consulting roles (MBB)
• Background in specific verticals: financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, debt collection
• Contributions to open-source AI tooling or frameworks
• Experience with post-acquisition integration or operating in high-ambiguity environment

Why This Role Is Exciting

• Repeatable impact: Every acquisition is a new deployment of the patterns you've built—your work compounds. You will drive millions of EBITDA.
• Product influence: Your implementations directly shape what becomes platform across the portfolio
• Frontier technology: You're deploying AI capabilities to transform legacy industries that haven't seen innovation in decades
• Learning velocity: Every portfolio company is a masterclass in a new domai

We encourage you to apply, even if you don't meet all the criteria.

About the Company

Who are we?

Join us at the forefront of innovation in the AI sector. Our mission is to accelerate the future of work. We're not merely envisioning the future; we're actively constructing it.

We are a well-funded Silicon Valley based Series A startup backed by top-tier VCs, pioneering a new model of acquisition-led growth. Instead of building software companies the traditional way—chasing customers with sales and marketing—we acquire entire businesses and reinvent them from the inside out.

Our founding team boasts a remarkable track record in AI and the startup ecosystem, with each member having previously steered AI startups to unicorn status (Cresta.ai).

Our approach is not SaaS: We drive growth through acquisition and technology is our transformation engine. Each company we bring on board comes with complex workflows, legacy systems, and antiquated data structures. We turn that complexity into opportunity, designing platforms that unlock efficiency, scale, and profitability.

What's in it for you?

• Working with cutting-edge AI technologies on real-world transformation problems
• Collaborate with world-class talent across engineering, product, and operations
• Making an impact from day one - your work directly shapes how we transform entire industries
• Challenging environment with a plethora of growth opportunities
• Competitive compensation and benefits
• High ownership and visibility in a small, high-trust team