Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Form Energy is an American manufacturing and energy technology company revolutionizing energy storage with cost-effective, multi-day technology designed to keep the electric grid secure and reliable. We are scaling rapidly across research, manufacturing, field deployment, and business operations, and are looking for a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer to solve critical software challenges across these domains.

About the Role

As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, you will embed directly with teams doing Form Energy's hardest work—scientists, engineers, operators, and business leaders—to identify high-leverage problems and build the software and AI solutions that address them. This is a hands-on, senior individual-contributor role where your impact is measured in problems solved, not tickets closed. You will own applications end-to-end, from data modeling to production deployment, and drive adoption of AI-driven automation within the guardrails of Form Energy’s AI-governance function.

This is a hybrid role requiring onsite work in Somerville, MA or Weirton, WV 3+ days per week. Relocation assistance is available.

Responsibilities

• Embed with teams across R&D, manufacturing, field and commercial operations, and supporting functions to understand their hardest problems firsthand, then design and build the software that solves them.
• Diagnose bottlenecks caused by missing software, manual processes, or brittle tooling; make judgment calls on what to build; and deliver solutions.
• Spearhead the adoption of AI-driven automation by prototyping and shipping AI-enabled tools and agents, ensuring real adoption within Form Energy’s AI-governance guardrails.
• Own full-stack web applications (e.g., React/Next.js/TypeScript frontends, Python/FastAPI backends, PostgreSQL) end-to-end, from data modeling to production deployment and user adoption.
• Transform expert knowledge—spreadsheets, notebooks, and tribal knowledge—into durable, maintainable, and trustworthy software systems.
• Build governed, traceable data models with versioned, append-only revision history and role-based access to ensure defensible and reconstructable decision-making.
• Integrate with Form Energy’s enterprise systems (Snowflake, Oracle, Arena, Jama, and others) while respecting authoritative boundaries and avoiding writes into systems you don’t own.
• Ship production-ready software using containerized services, CI/CD, and Form Energy’s internal Kubernetes platform, with observability, testing, and documentation.
• Use AI-assisted and agentic development to deliver higher-quality solutions faster than conventional engineering approaches.
• Work in a fast, prototype-to-product style: rapidly iterate with users, harden solutions, and avoid unmanageable technical debt.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience building and shipping production software, with a track record of owning complex applications end-to-end.
• Strong full-stack engineering skills: modern web frameworks (React/Next.js/TypeScript or similar) and production back-end languages/frameworks (Python/FastAPI strongly preferred), with solid relational data modeling (PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy, or equivalent).
• Demonstrated command of AI-assisted and agentic development to build faster and better, and a track record of embedding AI/ML into applications and workflows to remove toil and create leverage.
• Ability to model complex real-world domains in software, translating expert-held knowledge into correct, maintainable systems with rigorous data-layer invariants.
• Comfort working directly with non-engineering domain experts, embedded in their environment, and translating ambiguous problems into shipped software.
• Solid engineering fundamentals: Git, automated testing, CI/CD, and containerized deployment (Docker; Kubernetes a plus).
• Pragmatic, ownership-minded bias toward shipping value quickly, paired with the taste to know when something needs to be built to last.
• Range and self-direction: a history of quickly getting fluent in unfamiliar domains, shipping solutions, and owning outcomes as the sole or primary engineer.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience as a forward-deployed, solutions, or embedded engineer, working alongside users rather than behind a backlog.
• Experience building agentic or AI-automation systems for real operational workflows, with a point of view on where AI is most effective.
• Experience with operations research, optimization, or simulation (e.g., linear/mixed-integer programming, discrete-event simulation).
• Experience with enterprise data platforms (Snowflake, dbt) and the discipline of read-only vs. writable system boundaries.
• Experience integrating with ERP (Oracle), PLM (Arena), MES, or requirements-management (Jama) systems.
• Experience with enterprise identity/SSO (Microsoft Entra ID, OIDC).
• Fluency in a technical domain adjacent to Form Energy’s work: hardware, manufacturing, energy, scientific computing, or laboratory/industrial environments.
• Experience in a high-growth technology or first-of-a-kind manufacturing environment.

Benefits

• Competitive salaries and stock options.
• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision premiums for full-time employees (80% for dependents), starting on day one.
• At least 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents (up to 20 weeks for birthing parents).
• Generous vacation policies to ensure employees can recharge.

Pay

Compensation Range: $128,660 - $184,966