Forward Deployed Engineer

VectorShift is building the institutional memory layer for private markets. We work with private equity and private capital firms to turn the data scattered across their spreadsheets, fund admins, and documents into a living system: portfolio monitoring, fund analytics, and AI agents that answer the questions deal teams and CFOs actually ask. Our design partners include leading mid-market PE firms, and we ship weekly.

The role

You'll be the engineer who sits closest to our customers — embedded with PE fund finance teams and deal teams, building with them, and carrying what you learn back into the product. The job is threefold:

1. Build agents and workflows for clients and pilots. Configure and build AI agents, data pipelines, and automations on the VectorShift platform for customers — for both sides of the firm. For the finance team: ledger ingestion and reconciliation, quarterly data collection, document extraction (fund admin statements, LPAs, valuation backups). For the deal team: agents that prep the Monday portfolio review, extract underwriting assumptions from IC memos and board decks, rank exits by impact on fund returns, and answer "what happens to the fund if we sell this company next year?" on their real ledger. You own the pilot from first data file to the moment partners are asking your agents questions in a live meeting.

2. Bake it into the product. Every engagement teaches us what private-markets customers need out of the box. You'll turn one-off builds into reusable product: seeded templates, standard ingestion pipelines for common document formats, default configurations for fund structures (co-invests, SPVs, blockers, bridge loans). Your north star is making the next deployment need less of you.

3. Build the one-off features customers need. When a client needs something the product doesn't do yet — an export format, a calculation variant, an integration with their fund admin — you scope it, build it, and ship it, working directly with our core engineering team. You'll have real commit access to the product, not a sandbox.

What you'll do in a typical month

• Stand up a new pilot: ingest a fund's transaction ledger from Excel/fund-admin exports, reconcile IRR/MOIC to the decimal against their last reported figures, configure their portfolio
• Build an agent that extracts quarterly financials from 30 portfolio-company board packs
• Build the exit-scenario workflow a deal team runs before their quarterly portfolio review — then sit in that review and watch where it lands and where it falls short
• Turn a partner's offhand question ("which two moves get this fund to top quartile?") into a working agent by the following week
• Sit in customer working sessions with CFOs, controllers, analysts, and deal partners; translate "this is how our co-invest vehicle works" into working configuration
• Ship a productized version of something you built twice by hand
• Flag to product/engineering where the platform fought you, with the fix half-specced

What we're looking for

Must have

• 1–5 years as a software engineer, with real full-stack ability (we use Python and TypeScript) — you can ship production code alone
• Experience building with LLMs/agents: prompt pipelines, tool use, extraction from messy documents, evals
• Customer-facing instincts: you can run a working session with a non-technical finance team, hold the room with a deal partner who has ten minutes and no patience, hear what they mean rather than what they say, and you like being the person on the hook
• Strong data skills: you're at home in Excel-shaped chaos, SQL, and reconciling two systems that disagree
• Bias to productize: you get restless doing the same manual thing twice

Strongly preferred

• Exposure to finance — fund accounting, private equity, fintech, or having built for a CFO/finance buyer
• You understand (or can learn fast) IRR/MOIC/DPI mechanics, capital calls and distributions, fund structures
• Prior forward-deployed / solutions engineering / founding-engineer-at-a-services-heavy-startup experience

Not required

• Deep private-markets expertise on day one — we'll teach the domain to an engineer who's hungry for it

Why this role is a big deal here

Forward deployment is not a support function at VectorShift — it's how the product gets built. Our wedge is a two-week onboarding promise: a fund's files in on Monday, their three performance clocks live by the next portfolio review. You make that promise true.

And you're the tip of the spear on the harder, more valuable half of our thesis: deal teams have never adopted software — every incumbent gave up and sold to the back office instead. Your agents are how partners experience the product for the first time: in their Monday meeting, answering the sell/hold question on their own numbers. What works in the room becomes the roadmap. FDEs here have a direct line to the founders and disproportionate influence on what we build.

Details

• Location: US, NYC preferred; meaningful time on-site with customers
• Compensation: competitive base + significant early-stage equity
• Reports to: Founder/CEO (initially)