Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: Palo Alto, CA (Hybrid 3 days)

Employment Type: 6 Months contract to hire

About the Role: We are looking for Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) —senior, product-minded builders who operate like project founders rather than ticket-takers. You won't be handed a refined sprint backlog or a queue of Jira tickets. Instead, you'll be handed an open-ended goal, embedded directly with product and business teams, and given the autonomy to take a project from discovery, design, build, ship, iterate. This role sits on a small, elite internal R&D and AI team whose mission is to validate ideas fast and build exceptional products using state-of-the-art tools. You are equal parts engineer, product thinker, and communicator—comfortable shipping working software one hour and aligning stakeholders in direction the next. What You'll DoOwn Projects End-to-End: Take full accountability for outcomes, not just code. Deliver production systems from scratch with minimal oversight. Embed with Stakeholders: Sit close to product and business leaders, translate ambiguous needs into technical roadmaps, and build trust fast. Leverage AI as a Force Multiplier: Use agentic AI coding workflows aggressively to design, prototype, and ship at a pace traditional engineering teams can't match. Build Across the Full Stack: Move fluidly across frontend, backend, data, infrastructure, and AI features—picking the best tool for the job. Build AI-Native Products: Integrate LLMs, agentic workflows, RAG, and real-time capabilities directly into core products when it adds real value. Prototype to Production: Stand up rapid prototypes in days to validate ideas, then harden the winning concepts into resilient production systems. Tech Stack & Tooling While technology is secondary to a high-agency mindset, our core stack currently relies on: Primary Stack: Python, Next.js, TypeScriptAI-Native Tooling (Must-Have): Daily, aggressive use of agentic tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, etc. You build with AI by default to multiply your output. AI Ecosystem: Experience or familiarity with RAG, LLM evaluations, agentic frameworks, and voice/real-time models.

What We're Looking For: 10+ Years of Shipping Software: A track record of owning and delivering complex systems. Evidence of real impact matters far more to us than job titles. AI-Native to the Core: AI coding tools are an indispensable part of your daily workflow, not an occasional experiment. High Agency & Autonomy: You treat "figure it out" as a feature, not a bug. You thrive in ambiguity and move projects forward without needing to be managed. Problem Decomposition: Ability to take vague, open-ended business problems and break them into prioritized, sequenced workstreams. Clear Communication: Exceptional written and spoken English. You can write crisp docs, run working sessions, and communicate clearly with non-technical partners.