Jobs · Engineering · California

Forward Deployed Engineer

Sphinx · San Francisco, CA · 8 mo ago
On-siteEngineering$120k–$200k/yrFull-time

About the role

We’re automating compliance for banks and fintechs with AI agents that work like human analysts – on a browser. Demand is growing faster than we can keep up, and we’re expanding our deployment team to meet the needs of major institutions across the U.S., Canada, Europe, and LatAm. If you love shipping real systems in live environments, solving edge cases in record time, and working directly with clients, we should talk.

Why Join Sphinx

  • Massive, unsexy market: Banks spend $50B a year hiring thousands of analysts to review alerts and fill out reports by hand. The space has seen very little innovation, and customers complain about our most well-funded competitors weekly.
  • Small team, big surface area: Our co-founders previously sold an AI company & have built ML systems that scaled to millions of users and closed deals with major banks. The rest of our team in SF includes PhDs, industry experts, and competitive coders.
  • Hard tech: we’re going from zero to one; our tech is our moat. Zero startup bullshit: we’re not chasing investors, we’re chasing customers.
  • We’re trusted by leading banks and fintechs across the world. They’ve seen 90% less manual work, 4× lower costs.

Technical Challenges

  • Browser Agents for the Invisible Web: Most financial crime data isn't accessible via APIs – it lives in legacy systems, government portals, and third-party platforms. We're building agents that navigate these systems like humans do: clicking, scrolling, interpreting unstructured data, and adapting to interface changes. This requires computer vision, DOM understanding, and robust error handling at scale.
  • Adapting to Live Client Environments: Every deployment is unique. You’ll design flexible integration layers, map complex workflows, and make agents resilient to interface changes and client-specific quirks. You’ll ship fixes in live environments, build diagnostic tools, and feed learnings back into our product to make every deployment faster and smarter.

Human-AI Collaboration

  • Work directly with compliance officers and analysts to translate SOPs into structured agent logic – capturing human judgment and turning it into repeatable automation.
  • From first call to production rollout, you’ll lead the full lifecycle of deployments, bridging engineering, product, and client success.

What We Look For

  • Solve problems end-to-end: Our team owns features vertically. You'll architect agent behaviors, build backend systems, optimize ML pipelines, and ship product features – often in the same week.
  • Have a high bar for quality: In financial crime, "mostly working" isn't good enough. Build for uptime, obsess over failure points, and ship agents that institutions trust with billions in transactions.
  • Comfortable in ambiguity: No two client environments are alike. Enjoy the challenge of figuring things out as you go, and have confidence in your ability to become fluent with our product.
  • Communicate with clarity: Translate client needs into precise technical requirements and technical issues into clear explanations.
  • Energized by impact: Our customers protect the financial system from criminals. Your code directly prevents money laundering and terrorism financing. That matters.
  • Hate bureaucracy: Fix the problem instead of scheduling meetings about it. You’re happiest when you’re building, experimenting, and making things work.

Compensation & Benefits

  • Compensation Range: $120K - $200K
  • Lunch, dinner and snacks at the office
  • Comprehensive healthcare
  • Annual offsite (last one in Mexico!)
  • Paid relocation & one-month temporary housing
  • Latest tech and as many monitors as you can fit on a desk

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