Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: San Francisco (US)

Experience Level: Senior

Description

This is the founding Forward Deployed Engineer role at Nimble. You build AI agents and search integrations with our customers and take them to production. After qualification, you partner with the Solution Consultant and customer engineers to refine the architecture and agree on success criteria. You build the first working version against the customer's real queries, workflows, and codebase, and prove it on their evaluation set. You lead the implementation through production deployment and an agreed handoff, equipping the customer's engineers to operate and extend what you build. A typical engagement lasts 12 weeks.

On each engagement, you own these technical decisions:

• Refining the implementation architecture.
• Choosing the appropriate orchestration approach.
• Defining evaluations with the customer.
• Negotiating technical scope and sequencing.
• Deciding what can be reused and what needs to remain customer-specific.

As the first member of the team, you help craft the strategy for the FDE function. That covers how we scope and run engagements, the playbook the team works from, and who we hire next.

The role is based in New York or San Francisco, 3 days a week in the office. This role reports to the Director of Solution Consulting. You do not carry a sales quota.

Base pay is $170K to $235K, depending on level. The package adds 10% to 15% variable pay and equity.

Responsibilities

• Turn the customer's goal into a working flow of Search, Extract, and Web Search Agent calls, wired into the customer's own code.
• Build the first version on the customer's real queries, side by side with the customer's engineer.
• Define representative evaluation sets and success criteria with the customer. Benchmark quality, latency, and cost as you iterate, and instrument production workflows to detect failures and regressions.
• Write the orchestration code that keeps the flow stable in production, with fan-out, dedupe, retries, and cost caps.
• Embed Nimble in the customer's agent through our MCP server, our SDKs, or the API, on a schedule or on demand.
• Present results to the customer's engineers and executives, and record the technical win with the Solution Consultant.
• Write the runbook, train the customer's engineer, and hand the account to Customer Success.
• Identify recurring customer needs and turn successful implementations into reusable integrations, evaluation tools, reference applications, and product improvements.
• Shape the FDE function: the engagement model, the entry and exit criteria, the playbook, and the profile of the next hires.

Requirements

Technical expertise

• You write production Python and can read and change TypeScript.
• You have shipped and operated LLM-powered applications for real users, and can explain how you handled failures and managed latency and cost at each step.
• You have designed or improved evaluations for an LLM or other nondeterministic system, and used the results to make engineering decisions.
• You have built tools for an agent to call, through MCP, function calling or an equivalent.

Experience and skills

• You have 4+ years of software engineering and can show LLM or agent work you shipped, such as a repo, a live product or a case study.
• You have worked directly with customers or external partners to scope and deliver technical projects, whether as an FDE, software engineer, solutions engineer, consultant, or founder.
• You can run a discovery call with a VP and debug a failing run with an engineer on the same day.
• You are comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change in a fast-paced startup.

Bonus points

• You have worked on retrieval and RAG, including hybrid search, reranking, and freshness.
• You have built with LangGraph, the OpenAI Agents SDK, the Vercel AI SDK, or the Claude Agent SDK.
• You have delivered data to Snowflake or Databricks.
• You have worked with web data, such as scraping, anti-bot systems, and structured extraction.
• You use AI development tools effectively and take responsibility for reviewing, testing, and maintaining the code they produce

About us

Nimble is the company leading the AI web search category. Our products are used by leading businesses in financial services, retail, market intelligence, and coding to build best-in-class AI agents with accurate, auditable programmatic access to the web.

We've raised over $70 million from Norwest, Databricks Ventures, Target Global, Square Peg, and others to build expert-level web search for AI. Hundreds of enterprise customers already run on Nimble, and we're forming a world-class team of engineers, researchers, designers, marketers, sellers, and operational experts to achieve our mission.

Why join Nimble?

• Work on a deeply technical platform powering real-time AI and enterprise decisions
• Help define the future of Web Search Agents and live web intelligence
• Build alongside a sharp, mission-driven team that moves fast, ships often, and takes ownership