- Salary
- $50k – $200k/yr
- Location
- San Francisco, California, US
- Type
- Full-time
- Department
- Engineering
- Source
- Y Combinator
Description
Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will work directly with customers and the founding team to turn real industrial workflows into working end-to-end agents.
One day you may be mapping how an inside sales team handles RFQs. The next day you may be building a messy integration, improving product matching, writing evals for an agent, or talking to a 65 year old industry veteran to capture their knowledge.
What You’ll Do
- Build AI agents for quote intake, order entry, product matching, pricing, inventory checks, and customer/vendor communication.
- Integrate with messy real-world systems: Mainframe ERPs, CRMs, email inboxes, semi-broken APIs, scattered spreadsheets, etc.
- Work directly with users to understand how work actually happens, not how a process doc says it happens.
- Ship full-stack features across backend services, internal tools, customer-facing UI, and data pipelines.
- Build learning loops so agents get more reliable over time.
- Debug production issues in customer environments and turn one-off fixes into reusable product improvements.
You Might Be a Fit If
- You are technical, completing a CS degree or similar, and love Claude Code/Codex etc with multiple agents running in parallel.
- You like the idea of sitting next to a user and building product on the spot.
- You have built projects using LLMs outside class: startups, hackathons, open-source, research, automation scripts, internal tools. Bonus if it has had some users. Extra bonus if those users yelled at you about something!
- You can explain technical ideas to non-technical people and genuinely have fun doing it.
- You are curious about industries other than tech.
Nice To Have
- Experience with industrials or distribution, ERP systems, Outlook integrations
- Prior customer-facing technical work: FDE, solutions engineering, implementation, consulting, founder, or freelance projects.
Why Join
- Real ownership: your work will be used by customers and you will hear immediately if something does not work (and be expected to fix it).
- Travel: you will be flying to customer sites, sitting with teams, and seeing your agents do work in real environments.
- Exposure to the full startup loop: customer discovery, product decisions, engineering tradeoffs, deployment, support, and iteration.
- A chance to build AI for an overlooked but massive part of the economy.
