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