Forward Deployed AI Systems Engineer (Customer Deployment Specialist)

Role: Forward Deployed Engineer - Grads with internships welcome

Location: San Francisco, CA (in-office) | Salary: $180,000–$250,000 | Stage: Seed | Visa sponsorship available

Our client builds AI systems that do a company's hardest work and verify it — so people can finally step out of the loop. Rather than another copilot that speeds humans up, they eliminate entire classes of work: reconciliation across physical and digital systems, invoice/PO matching, month-end close. Early customers in finance and accounting already feel the difference, and the focus now is scaling deployment.

The team is tight-knit, highly technical, and unusually close to the work — everyone talks to customers and ships full systems end to end.

The Role

This is the deployment seat. One day you're shadowing a finance team to map how they close the books; the next you're wiring computer-use agents into their actual systems; the next you're showing their CAO that a week of work now takes an hour.

It's post-sales, but there's no revenue quota. Success is measured by how many customers you're deploying with, the value they're getting, and whether you can run engagements solo after a short shadowing period.

What you'll own:

• Embedding with customer teams — shadowing experts and capturing the tribal knowledge that makes their work correct
• Building and deploying agents tailored to each customer's systems and edge cases
• Aligning 5+ stakeholder groups per deployment to drive fast time-to-value
• Feeding field patterns directly back into the platform roadmap
• Presenting the product with sharp narration and demo pacing tailored to each workflow
• Running engagements fully solo after initial ramp-up

What We're Looking For

• Strong generalist engineer — comfortable across backend (Node, Postgres), frontend (React/TypeScript), and ML-adjacent work (fine-tuning, agent configuration)
• A real technical bar — enough to solve a customer gap quickly (not core engineering, but this is where most candidates fall short)

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• High EQ and commercial instinct — charismatic, thinks in business outcomes (weighted slightly above pure technical skill)
• Excellent communicator who translates fluidly between technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Design and presentation taste — demo pacing, visual clarity, narrative arc
• Self-directed, comfortable in ambiguity, and able to own a customer engagement solo

Background: 0–3 years. Great fits include solutions/growth engineering, technical founders, or forward-deployed/technical-consulting profiles who've worked directly with external customers (think technology consultants, not business-strategy generalists).

Bonus points: experience at firms that pioneered the forward-deployed engineering model, technical consulting on external customer projects, or strong design sense for customer-facing demos.

Benefits

All meals covered, full health coverage, 401(k), unlimited PTO, relocation support, new computer and gear, and team off-sites.