Forward Deploy AI Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site · Full-timeCompensation: $200,000–$300,000 + 0.1%–0.2% equity

About the Company

Our client builds infrastructure for agent behavior monitoring. Where traditional observability focuses on logging exceptions and latency, this surfaces behavioral anomalies — instruction drift, context-retrieval loss, hallucinations — in scaled production environments. Hundreds of teams building autonomous agents rely on it to understand how their systems behave post-deployment, turning real usage data into scoring and feedback loops that continuously improve agent reliability, performance, and decision-making at scale. It raised significantly across two rounds in the past five months.

Founded 2024 · under 20 people · Industry: AI infrastructure / observability

The Role

A Forward-Deployed AI Engineer who embeds the platform directly into customers' production systems — integrating monitoring and evaluation into real agent workflows, diagnosing failures in live environments, and driving deployments to reliable production use. It's heavily customer-facing: strong communication is as critical as engineering depth. The team explicitly prioritizes strong software engineers who can flex into a forward-deployed role over candidates with a purely solutions background.

Tech stack: Full-stack with backend/infra weight; production AI / LLM-based systems.

Requirements

• 3–7 years of software engineering, with strong product-engineering ability shipping features end to end inside customer codebases
• Some form of applied AI experience (AI-adjacent exposure preferred over a pure solutions hire)
• Strong customer-facing communication — explains complex concepts clearly and builds trust with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Comfort deploying AI or LLM-based systems into real production environments
• Ability to translate ambiguous customer goals into concrete technical solutions
• The forward-deployed role is your genuine first choice, not a fallback
• Based in SF or willing to relocate; 5 days in person
• Wants to be a technical founder in the future

Nice to Haves

• A strong software-engineering background from a solid product company (e.g., Roblox, Snapchat, Tesla; Databricks-tier a bonus)
• Experience deploying AI or LLM-based systems to production
• A background from infrastructure/observability companies (e.g., Databricks, Datadog, Cognition)
• 4–5+ years of engineering experience (strong juniors welcome case-by-case)
• Genuinely set on the FDE role as a first choice
• A technical background (coding competitions, research) in addition to solutions experience

Why Join

• A founder training ground: own customer engagements end to end across real production systems, with the scope and autonomy of founding a technical company
• Deep technical and customer ownership on a fast, well-funded team shipping at high velocity with a sub-20-person team
• Top-of-band comp and perks: $200K–$300K, 0.1%–0.2% equity, full benefits, gym membership, private chef, and direct influence on the roadmap

Details

• Location — San Francisco, CA
• Work policy — On-site, 5 days/week
• Compensation — $200,000–$300,000 + 0.1%–0.2% equity
• Visa sponsorship — H-1B, O-1, OPT considered case-by-case for exceptional candidates; main scope is candidates who don't require sponsorship
• Employment type — Full-time