Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
About the Role
As a founding Forward Deployed Engineer at an early-stage SaaS company, you will own customer deployments from initial data access through working systems that deliver measurable business outcomes. You will work across data engineering, applied AI, and customer success, while building reusable tools and frameworks to make future deployments more effective.
What You'll Do
Partner with revenue and operations leaders to understand business objectives and identify what is worth building.
Scope customer data access, explore warehouse schemas, and map technical structures to business concepts.
Interview data and business teams to establish shared definitions and validate the resulting ontology.
Build customer-facing signals and workflows, including the agent setups behind them, and troubleshoot their outputs.
Define success measures with customers and develop analysis that demonstrates whether the work delivered business value.
Turn deployment learnings into reusable validation frameworks, evaluation harnesses, and mapping tools.
What We're Looking For
At least 3 years of experience in a technical, customer-facing role such as forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, or software engineering with substantial customer exposure.
Strong SQL and data warehouse skills, including dbt and the ability to navigate undocumented schemas.
Experience with applied statistics or data science, including distributions, seasonality, validation design, calibration, and modeling.
Experience building custom agent configurations beyond default implementations.
Ability to resolve conflicting business definitions through interviews and data validation, and to define metrics and demonstrate customer impact.
A degree in statistics, mathematics, computer science, or a comparable quantitative field; founder experience or a non-traditional path into engineering is also welcome.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary range: $180,000 to $250,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in New York, New York, United States.