Forward Deployed Engineer

About Curium

Curium is the enterprise platform for brands to win AI search. Founded by the Princeton team that
invented and coined GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), we combine proprietary
reinforcement-learning models with a turn-key content optimization platform. We power brands like Nike, 500M+ luxury labels, category-leading consumer fintechs, and compliance-heavy B2B enterprises.
Backed by General Catalyst, the ex-CTO of OpenAI, and the CEO of Intel.

About the role
We're hiring a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to own customer accounts end-to-end. You'll run the campaigns, ship the custom workflows, and make sure our customers actually win in AI search.
This role sits at the intersection of customer success, solutions engineering, and product. You'll be the technical and strategic owner across the accounts you work on, with real influence over how we deliver and what we build next.
Based in San Francisco, in-person.

What you'll do
• Own the account: Run every customer you're assigned end-to-end. Lead biweekly cadence with their CMO and marketing team, define campaign goals, set up dashboards and topics in Curium, and
present wins, losses, and recommendations. You're the face of Curium for that customer.
• Build technical POCs: Prototype quickly against real customer problems. Ship working apps that
customers actually use, iterate based on what they say. The goal is a usable v0 in days, not a polished
v1 in weeks.
• Run campaigns: Translate customer goals into a concrete plan, coordinate execution across the team, and measure what worked. Work closely with content strategists, engineering, and leadership to land outcomes.
• Productize what works: Turn the patterns that show up across customers into product. Partner with
engineering to take POCs from one-off workflows into features that scale.

Who you are
• You're the hybrid of product and engineering. You've been a technical PM who codes, a founding
engineer who talks to customers, or a forward-deployed engineer who owns both the build and the
outcome. Not a pure engineer, not a pure PM.
• You build full-stack prototypes end-to-end. Comfortable with a modern web stack (React or Next.js, a backend, a database), fluent with agentic dev tools, and able to ship a working app that solves a real
customer problem in days, not weeks.
• You're customer obsessed. You can run a meeting with a CMO, hold your own under pressure, and turn
messy data into a deck that landed.
• You write clearly. Your customer emails, briefs, and follow-ups get responses because they're tight,
direct, and human. Not corporate templates or engineer-speak.
• You optimize for speed. You ship v0 in hours, not weeks. You'd rather hack the thing than write a spec for it.
• You take real ownership. When a CMS integration breaks at 9pm or a customer's campaign isn't
moving, you're the one who unblocks it.

Nice to have
• Background in growth, marketing tech, SEO, GEO, or content distribution
• Worked at a seed/Series A startup as one of the first 10 hires
• Founded something, even if it didn't work out
• Public writing: blog, Substack, Twitter, launch posts, Loom walkthroughs. Anything that shows you've written for a real audience.
• Public side projects with real users (deployed apps, not GitHub-only repos)

Why this role
You'll own a small number of accounts with a huge surface area. What you ship for one customer
becomes the playbook for the next, and the workflows you hack together become product. It's the most direct path we have from customer pain to product reality.