Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

A billion‑dollar logistics technology scale‑up is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to join their team. The role is fully remote across the US, with Chicago preferred, and involves up to 50% travel to client sites and the Chicago office. This is a full‑time, permanent position. As the founding Forward Deployed Engineer, you will help define the role, embed with enterprise shipper accounts, shadow operations teams, identify bottlenecks in manual freight workflows, and ship AI‑powered automation that works in production. You’ll work at the intersection of hands‑on engineering and direct client engagement, supported by an applied AI engineering squad and a senior logistics partner who owns the broader client relationship.

Responsibilities

• Shadow client operations teams to observe workflows firsthand, then run structured discovery to identify and prioritize the pain points worth solving.
• Design the right solution for each prioritized problem—whether an automation, an AI agent, a system integration, or a combination—and scope it before building.
• Build and integrate solutions against real enterprise systems including TMS, WMS, YMS, and ERP platforms.
• Prototype and ship working automation fast, including automated check calls, shipment tracking, carrier qualification and onboarding flows, and voice or chat‑based agents.
• Tune prompts, agent behavior, and voice or transcription models based on real production data and edge cases, continuing to refine after launch as real usage surfaces new cases.
• Identify security, compliance, and infrastructure requirements early, and work with internal stakeholders to resolve them before they become blockers.
• Feed patterns and learnings back to product and engineering so recurring solutions become reusable platform capabilities, not one‑off fixes.
• Help define and document the FDE operating model as the practice scales.

Requirements

• 5+ years full‑stack engineering experience.
• Strong Python and TypeScript proficiency, including fast‑prototyping frameworks.
• Hands‑on experience building and shipping AI‑driven automation workflows in production, including prompt design, agent and tool orchestration, and model tuning.
• Proven track record building and maintaining APIs and integrations with third‑party or enterprise systems, including REST and GraphQL.
• Demonstrated ability to work directly with non‑technical stakeholders, translating operational needs into technical plans they trust.
• Comfortable debugging, re‑scoping, or improvising in front of a client when things don’t go to plan.
• Track record of shipping working software quickly in ambiguous, fast‑changing environments.
• Willingness and availability to travel up to 50% across the US.
• Bias to action and comfort owning outcomes end to end, from discovery through production, without a fully scoped spec.

Benefits

• Competitive equity package.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• 401k match.

Pay

Base salary range: $115,700 to $180,800.

Schedule

Fully remote across the US (Chicago preferred); up to 50% travel to client sites and the Chicago office; full‑time, permanent position.