Forward Deployed Engineer - AI

Career Renew is recruiting for one of its clients a Forward Deployed Engineer - AI - this is an onsite role in San Francisco. Salary range: 175-250K USD base plus benefits plus equity. We are your AI Operations teammate that helps you fully automate your SOPs end-to-end. Our agents can automate almost any complex workflow using a mixture of browser automation, document processing and API calls. Companies in complex industries like Healthcare, Payroll Services, Logistics, Marketplaces have been using us to automate tedious manual processes end-to-end. Our mission is to eliminate repetitive work, so businesses can grow without having to scale headcount. We're looking for a Deployment Architect / Forward Deployed Engineer to own the path from "first customer call" to "signed contract and live in production." You'll sit next to our customers, map their messiest workflows, stand up working agents in days (not quarters), and carry deals across the finish line. This role is the rare combination of technical depth and deal-driving instinct. Your job is to take an interested prospect through the POC stage and turn them into a paying customer. That means configuring real agents against real customer data on Monday, then running the pricing conversation on Friday—and knowing how each one shapes the other. Pure engineers stall in procurement; pure sellers can't get the POC working. You do both. This is the highest-leverage role on the team right now. Every pilot you land becomes a product signal, a reference customer, and a revenue line. Every deal you lose tells us what to build next. The company moves at the speed you move at. If you're technical (or "leaning technical") and want direct, unfiltered exposure to real customers—their pain, their politics, their budgets, their buying process—this is one of the best seats in the building for it. It's also one of the best possible preparations for starting your own company: you'll see how enterprises actually buy, how pilots actually die, and how trust actually gets built. What You'll Own Customer discovery + solutioning Sit in on (and often run) first calls with operations leaders. Translate vague pain into a crisp, scoped workflow we can automate. Shadow real operators doing real work—on Zoom, in their tools, in their SOPs—so we build for the job, not the pitch deck. Translate what you hear into working demos, POCs, and pilot plans that get champions fired up and skeptics nodding. Pilot delivery + deployment Stand up agents against live customer data and real tools within the first week of a pilot. Speed is the product. Configure prompts, tools, evals, and guardrails for each customer's quirks; know when to hand off to product engineering vs. when to solve it yourself. Own the pilot success plan: what metric we're moving, what "good" looks like, who on the customer side signs off, and by when. Deal execution Drive deals forward with a sense of urgency. Nudge, don't nag. Create momentum without creating friction. Read the room: identify the champion, the economic buyer, the blocker, and the quietly-skeptical engineer. Build a plan for each. Own the close: pricing conversations, security review, procurement, redlines. Know which concessions are cheap and which are expensive. Write the follow-ups that actually get replied to. Summaries, next steps, mutual action plans—short, specific, dated. Product feedback loop Be the highest-signal source of customer truth inside the company. Ship back structured, ranked feedback—not anecdotes. Partner with engineering on what to harden next: the five things breaking across pilots, not the one thing breaking for one customer. Build the reusable pieces: demo environments, pilot templates, onboarding flows, solution patterns. Leverage your own wins. Trust + expansion Be our face for evaluators. Calm under pressure, credible on technical detail, honest about limitations. Turn pilots into multi-team and multi-workflow expansions. The second deal inside an account is where the real business is. Requirements: 2 - 4 years of experience in a customer-facing technical role such as forward deployed engineer or solutions engineer (Mandatory) You've owned customer relationships in a technical capacity. (Mandatory) You've written code in a rigorous, fast-paced environment (early-stage startups preferred) (Mandatory) Pre-sales experience (e.g., scoping out requirements, putting together and delivering customer demos). (Nice-to-have) You've been a founder or co-founder at a startup that gained meaningful traction.(Nice-to-have) C.S. or equivalent formal technical degree.(Nice-to-have) Strong engineering fundamentals. (Mandatory) Comfortable using AI coding tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) in day-to-day workflows.(Mandatory) Strong preference for alumni of AI-native companies (e.g., Cresta, Sierra)