Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Seed Funded AI Start-up

Location: United States (East Coast)

Competitive Salary + Strong Equity

The Role

We're looking for a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to join an exceptionally well-funded AI start-up that has recently raised a significant seed round, with backing from some of the most respected investors in the AI market. Led by founders with a proven track record of success, this is an opportunity to join at the ground floor of a company with serious ambition and the resources to scale.

They're building cutting-edge AI solutions to solve complex business challenges, helping customers turn emerging AI capabilities into real-world impact. As a founding FDE, you'll work directly with customers and the founding team to design, build and deploy AI-powered solutions into production.

You'll own the full journey from understanding customer challenges and developing technical solutions through to implementation, deployment and ongoing iteration.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role for an ambitious software engineer who enjoys solving complex technical problems, working directly with customers and building from zero to one.

What you will do

• Work directly with customers to understand business challenges, technical requirements and opportunities for AI adoption.
• Design, build and deploy AI-powered solutions tailored to customer workflows.
• Develop AI agents, integrations and applications that connect with customer systems, data sources and APIs.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into practical technical designs and production-ready software.
• Own the deployment lifecycle, from initial discovery and prototyping through to production rollout and optimisation.
• Troubleshoot complex technical challenges across integrations, data pipelines and AI workflows.
• Collaborate closely with Product and Engineering to translate customer feedback into platform improvements.
• Help establish the tools, processes and best practices that will support a growing forward deployed engineering function.

Who You Are:

• Experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering or a similar customer-facing software engineering role.
• Strong experience in AI/Model research and applied AI/ML engineering
• Good software engineering fundamentals and experience building production systems.
• Experience with AI/ML technologies, LLMs, AI agents or applied AI applications.
• Tech agnostic, working across different technology stacks, APIs and customer environments.
• Technical problem-solving skills, can turn open-ended challenges into practical solutions.
• Clear communication skills and confidence working directly with customers.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, autonomy and taking ownership in an early-stage start-up.
• Excited by the opportunity to join a founding team, influence product direction and build a function from the ground up.
• Strong interest in AI and its application to real-world business problems.

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