Founding Forward Deployed Engineer, AI (US East Coast, Hybrid)

Job Summary

This role genuinely sits in the middle of real technical work, direct customer interaction and actual business impact.

What You'll Be Responsible For

• Rapid Prototyping: Build small, high-impact, demoable features fast — against direct sales, CS, or customer pain — so the team can validate an idea in front of a prospect rather than promise it.
• Engineering Presence in the Field: Be the credible technical voice on prospect and customer calls in US hours, covering capability, integration, and security questions, and pulling in deeper specialists when needed.
• Productionisation: Once a prototype proves its value, partner with the relevant UK squad to turn it into a robust, supported part of the product.
• Feedback Loop: Capture what you see and hear in the field and feed it back to Product and Engineering as concrete, prioritisable signal.
• Test-and-Play Support: Build and tailor working environments and features for trials and proofs of concept that improve win rates.
• Federal Support: As one of a small US-based group cleared to work inside the FedRAMP environment, contribute to federal deployment support and the on-call rota alongside our DevSecOps and backend engineers.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with US Sales and CS, the US platform/DevSecOps engineers, and UK product squads.

What You'll Bring to the Team

• Strong, Fast, Pragmatic Build: You can stand up a working full-stack feature quickly and judge the right bar for the moment.
• Customer Credibility: You can hold your own in a room with a prospect's technical and security people, and you enjoy it.
• Independence and Judgement: You're comfortable working outside a fixed roadmap, deciding what's worth building, and prioritising against commercial impact without close direction.
• Collaborative Instinct: You bridge naturally between commercial teams and engineering, and bring validated ideas back into the core product rather than building a silo.
• Resilience in Ambiguity: Comfortable operating without detailed specifications and iterating through feedback in a fast-moving environment.

Requirements

• Experience: 5+ years in software engineering, with demonstrable experience building and shipping features fast, ideally in a fast-paced or start-up environment.
• Customer-Facing Background: Prior experience in a forward deployed engineer, solutions engineer, sales engineer, or founding/early-engineer role at a B2B software company.
• Work Authorization: US Citizen, plus background check (required for our federal compliance environment).
• Location: Based in or around New York City, or willing to relocate; set up to work US business hours with overlap into the UK morning.
• On-Call: Willing to share the US federal on-call rota alongside our DevSecOps and backend engineers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Production LLM Experience: Hands-on experience building and shipping LLM-powered features in production.
• Demo and POC Craft: A track record of building things that won deals, with examples you can talk through.
• GovCon / Federal Familiarity: Understanding of US public-sector procurement, GovCon workflows, or regulated-environment requirements (FedRAMP, GSA, and similar).
• Prompt Engineering and Context Techniques: Practical grasp of prompt engineering, RAG, and related techniques for getting reliable behavior out of LLMs.
• Stack Familiarity: Comfort with our TypeScript stack (Express, NestJS, React); Python a bonus.
• Onsite Presence: We have a NY office in Midtown. We don't mandate office days, but for this role in particular — where the whole point is engineering presence alongside the US sales and CS teams — regular face time is a significant plus.

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive Salary: $180,000 - $200,000 depending on specific experience and qualifications relevant to the role.
• Stock Options: Meaningful equity in the company.
• Comprehensive medical/dental/life insurance: Insurance coverage for individuals and families partially paid by the company as well as opportunity to participate in pre-tax health Flexible Spending Account.
• Retirement Plan: Ability to invest your pre-tax dollars in a 401(k) retirement plan with company matching contributions.
• Paid Time Off: Unlimited vacation (Yes, you read right!)
• Flexible Work Options: NYC based with regular collaboration time at our midtown NYC office.
• Paid parental leave: 12 weeks if you’ve just given birth, 4 weeks if your partner has just given birth (after one year of year of service)
• Additional Perks: Your choice of laptop (Mac or Windows), regular company events to connect with teammates, and opportunities for continued professional development.