Forward Deployed Engineer

Job Description

We’re extremely hands-on with customers to learn about their pain points, shape our product, and make it work for them. Today, onboarding a new customer involves data onboarding (connecting to their Salesforce, understanding their data, and transforming it into our standardized format), configuration (wiring up our system to work for them and making sure results look good), potentially structuring and starting a pilot for 2 months during which we iterate to make the product work for them and prove out ROI, and then (post converting a full contract) staying close with the customers to make sure the product is working well for them and continue iterating as needed, based off any feedback on LLM + ML model performance.

This has been working great (we have a high conversion rate from qualified pilot → paying customer and typically pay for ourselves multiple times over through ROI in the pilot alone), but this takes time and hands-on, customer-focused work.

As we’re looking to rapidly scale our customer base this year, we’re looking for a first Forward Deployed Engineer who is excited to work closely with customers to make the product work for them and run pilots as well as onboard new customers, but also then use those observations to improve the product and our tooling to make getting future customers to success as fast, easy, and ideally self-serve as possible.

This is an incredibly high-leverage role since this is a huge bottleneck to our ability to scale revenue this year and next.

Day in the Life

This role is probably a mix between being:

• a Deployed Engineer at a company like Retool (work closely with customers to understand their business and get them to success)
• a Data Scientist (understanding a customer’s data, decent amount of SQL, python, analyzing model performance and digging into data)
• a founder! (extremely high ownership, willing to “do what it takes” to make customers succeed, motivated by customer love… right now our founders do this role themselves)
• a PM (figuring out how to improve the product and build lots of intelligence to make the product work for future customers as “out-of-the-box” as possible)

If this sounds exciting to you, we’d love to chat!

Who You Are

The following are some attempts to define what the ideal candidate could look like for this role, but this would be our first Forward Deployed Engineer hire and we’re excited to chat with you if you think you could be a a great fit regardless of how many of the items below you meet!

• Incredibly detail oriented - You are going to be working with multiple customers and receive multiple requests from reps, managers, directors, revenue operations, etc. and have to translate into code + manage different asks. Even when onboarding new customers, you are looking at a variety of specific columns.
• Very strong engineering, ML, and data background. You have great Python & SQL skills, know ML fundamentals, and interest or experience in working with LLMs. In the past, you’ve built things from scratch and/or learned how to develop an intuitive understanding of complex systems with lots of moving pieces.
• High autonomy, ambitiousness, and ownership. You’re pragmatic and love to ship quickly to deliver for customers; you’re excited about owning and leading a major part of our product / one of the company’s top priorities.
• Excitement about being hands-on and iterating with customers. You’re a great communicator with blend of technical & GTM skills, and you love to talk to customers and users and make them happy! You’re very scrappy and willing to dig in where needed. You can figure out what customers want and drill that back into their underlying pain points.
• High slope and desire / ability to learn quickly. You always want to learn and know how you learn best; you’re able to pick up new skills (technical or non-technical) quickly and seek out the help you need.
• Stellar career trajectory & excited to take the next step in your path!
  • Ideally: 3+ years of experience in a role working very closely with internal stakeholders or customers (e.g., former founder, Data Scientist, Solutions / Forward Deployed Engineer, etc.)
  • Ideally: experience in a role where you owned delivery for customers
  • Ideally: experience at a hyper-growth startup or top tech company