Forward Deployed Engineer
About the Role
Forward Deployed Engineers make the strategists' bets real by working as genuine client-facing software engineers who design, develop, and maintain modern web and agentic applications. The bar is high agency and high urgency, with less weight on where someone trained and more on what they've actually built. The pace is real, and the standard is that work ships and lands: what counts is whether the workflow is still running on Monday morning when nobody from the company is in the room, not the demo.
This is not a mandated always-on culture, but it is not a standard 40-hour week either: if a deliverable isn't done by Friday, the expectation is to grind through the weekend to land it right, not to wait until Monday.
We consider intact teams of two to five people (from a pivoting venture, a layoff, or simply a group ready to build together) as a unit, running them through the same bar as individual hires and extending offers to the whole team at once.
Requirements
- Must-Have:
- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience (sweet spot 3-8 years, no hard cap)
- Demonstrated experience designing, developing, and maintaining modern web or agentic applications
- Experience leading technical initiatives as a tech lead, team lead, founding engineer, or comparable high-ownership capacity
- Comfortable operating with high autonomy in ambiguous situations
- Genuine client-facing or customer-facing experience: comfortable presenting technical work directly to non-technical stakeholders
- Nice-to-Have:
- Experience as a co-founder or CTO at a tech startup
- Computer science or engineering degree
- Founded or contributed early at a small AI software development shop, even without major traction
- Comfortable using agentic coding tools as part of daily workflow
Compensation
We pay a guaranteed base with an uncapped variable that scales directly with shipped work, tracked through an internal story-point system tied to client engagements.
- Salary base : $180,000
- Variable structure : a quarterly bonus once an engineer is
- Typical outcomes : engineers in good standing generally earn an additional $10,000-$15,000 per quarter beyond base pay; top performers have earned $60,000-$80,000 in a single quarter.
- Additional upside : performance-based, discretionary bonus becomes available on top of the story-point bonus as leveling frameworks roll out.
Benefits & Perks
- Guaranteed base + uncapped quarterly variable pay tied directly to output
- Comprehensive medical (PPO and HSA options), dental, and vision
- HSA, Healthcare FSA, and Commuter Benefits
- 100% employer-paid life insurance and AD&D
- 100% employer-paid long-term disability insurance
- Responsible PTO: take what you need
- Equity may become available to employees in the future
- Visa Sponsorship: H-1B