Forward Deployed Engineer

About the company

Our client is a fast-growing software company.

The role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Work as a hands-on engineer embedded with large business customers, owning technical deployment and ongoing success after the sale. Split time between building custom tooling, supporting pre-sales technical evaluations and acting as a bridge between customers and internal product and engineering teams. This is a founding role in a newly created function.

What you'll do

• Support sales colleagues before the sale by running technical evaluations, building demo applications and helping win competitive bake-offs.
• Own technical success for a small set of enterprise accounts, meeting with customers regularly to resolve issues, deepen adoption and open up expansion.
• Build whatever the customer needs, from an evaluation app to a tailored agent or changes to an existing product surface.
• Develop strong relationships with customer stakeholders, especially technical ones.
• Create diagnostics, dashboards and evaluation harnesses to measure performance and catch regressions across environments.
• Relay usability gaps, unmet needs and opportunities back to product and engineering teams.
• Work directly with founders and customers to help shape product direction and engineering strategy.

Requirements

What we're looking for

• Several years of hands-on experience taking software live in production environments, ideally for customers with demanding or regulated requirements.
• A background at a well-regarded early-stage company, delivering working software to business clients.
• Strong Python proficiency, with the ability to work in Bash and infrastructure as needed.
• Fluency with AI-assisted coding tools and a solid grasp of LLM and machine learning concepts.
• Comfort leading technical discussions on customer calls, with clear and polished communication.
• A quantitative, hands-on approach: able to debug, experiment and iterate quickly across the full development lifecycle.
• A high bar for quality, strong ownership and the agency to step in and fix problems rather than only flag them.
• Willingness to build your own small tools, such as a quick app to test a hypothesis or assemble a dataset.

Bonus points

• Founding experience or early-stage product building.
• Prior experience in a forward-deployed role supporting large customers.
• Ability to design and run evaluations.
• Comfort acting as both a backend-leaning engineer and a customer-facing lead.
• Up-to-date knowledge of developments in ML and AI.
• Degree from a top-tier university.

Benefits

Compensation and benefits

• Base salary: USD 220,000 to 320,000 per year
• Equity
• Health, dental and vision coverage
• Parental leave
• Flexible time off
• Wellness benefits

Location and work model

• San Francisco, CA, United States
• On-site, 5 days per week in office
• Full-time