Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

We are looking for a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer with 2 5 years of experience to own the end-to-end technical deployment of powered revenue platform into enterprise customer environments. You'll be the bridge between messy customer data warehouses and production-ready agent workflows translating tribal business knowledge into verified data models that power autonomous revenue expansion. This is a foundational hire on a 9-person team that's already gone from 0 to $1M in contracts with backing from TQ Ventures and HubSpot Ventures. What will you be doing? Onboard new customers end-to-end: scope data access, explore undocumented warehouses, and map chaotic schemas onto real business concepts (churn, expansion, ARR) Build and validate the semantic/ontology layer interviewing customer stakeholders, resolving conflicting business definitions, and encoding them into verified SQL queries Deploy Sylvan platform workflows and agent pipelines into customer instances, then monitor and ensure they deliver measurable revenue outcomes Manage 2 3 concurrent customer engagements, working directly in shared Slack channels with customer data and engineering teams (~20 30% customer-facing, ~70 80% heads-down data work) Dogfood the internal agent tooling and provide feedback to the engineering team on how to improve eval guardrails, validation frameworks, and the agent harness itself Dealbreaker Work experience Owned end- to- end customer deployments in a technical role data access, schema mapping, stakeholder management, and proving value delivery Shipped production data pipelines or systems independently wrote code, diagnosed issues, and deployed without hand- holding Hard skills Deep SQL and data warehouse fluency can navigate undocumented, legacy schemas and produce validated output independently AI- native actively uses AI coding tools (e. g. Claude, Cursor) and has built or customized their own agent- driven workflows Miscellaneous Must be based in or willing to relocate to New York City; fully on- site 5 days/week Baseline Seniority 2 - 5 years of experience as a forward deployed engineer or customer- facing software engineer Work experience Archetype 1: FDE, customer engineer, or solutions engineer at a data/AI company (e. g. Palantir, Databricks, Snowflake, Fivetran). Archetype 2: Analytics engineer or data scientist who moved into customer- facing delivery. Archetype 3: Ex- consulting/PE/IB with a real CS background and engineering skills (e. g. BCG, Bain tech deployments) Education BS in CS, Data Science, Statistics, or quantitative STEM field Strong school pedigree OR a recognizable company name on resume at least one of the two Hard skills Applied data science literacy distributions, seasonality, validation design; can spot when a result is noise Soft skills Defends technical positions under customer pushback changes mind for evidence, not authority Miscellaneous High tolerance for detail- oriented, repetitive data verification work (80%+ of role is data wrangling) Nice-to-have Work experience Early- stage startup experience (seed Series B); Big Tech acceptable only if paired with startup or founder experience