Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Company

Our client is a venture-backed applied AI company transforming how civil, structural, and MEP engineering firms design and deliver physical infrastructure.

Their thesis is blunt: most of what a practicing engineer does today is theoretically automatable, and almost none of it has been touched by AI. This is one of the largest and least contested opportunities in applied AI, in an industry technology companies have mostly ignored.

The team is small. This is one of the first engineering hires, working directly alongside the founders.

About the Role

You will sit inside engineering firms, watch how licensed engineers actually work, and turn what you see into software.

Discovery, prototype, ship, debug in production, then iterate live with the people using it. What works becomes a reusable product capability deployed across the next firm.

Very few engineers ever get access like this. You will be in the room where the work happens, alongside the people doing it, shipping in weeks rather than quarters.

What You Will Do

• Embed directly with civil, structural, and MEP engineering teams to understand how they actually work
• Earn trust with users who have never worked with a software company before
• Find the highest-leverage problem inside a messy workflow, then build the smallest thing that solves it
• Own projects end to end: discovery, development, deployment, and production support
• Integrate with legacy architecture, engineering, and construction software
• Build the data connectors, scrapers, browser automations, and document-processing workflows that make those integrations possible
• Develop AI applications using LLMs, RAG, agents, and real unstructured documents
• Turn conflicting user feedback into one clear technical direction
• Convert successful bespoke solutions into reusable platform capabilities
• Collaborate directly with the CTO on product strategy, technical architecture, and engineering culture

What Our Client Is Looking For

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and a track record of building production applications
• You have taken something from a blank page to production with real users on it
• You are comfortable being the least knowledgeable person in the room about the domain, and you ask questions until you are not
• Experience working closely with users who are expert at something other than software
• Strong product judgment and the ability to uncover what users actually need, not what they first ask for
• Comfort with ambiguous, incomplete, or conflicting requirements
• A high-agency, low-ego approach. No task is beneath you if it unblocks a deployment
• Experience or strong interest in LLMs, agent frameworks, RAG, browser automation, or document parsing
• Willing to work in person in New York City and travel regularly to customer sites

If you studied engineering and ended up in software, that background is an advantage here, not a detour.

Technology

Frontend: Next.js, Vercel, and Tailwind CSS
Backend: Kotlin and Python
Infrastructure: Multi-tenant AWS environment managed with Pulumi
AI: LLMs, RAG, agent frameworks, browser automation, and document intelligence

Experience with every technology is not required. The company is hiring for range, speed of learning, and the ability to deliver complete solutions.

Compensation and Benefits

Base salary of $200,000 to $280,000, depending on experience and impact
Founding-stage equity
Full healthcare benefits
In-person New York City office

Why This Role Matters

This role is where real customer problems meet long-term product development. Working alongside engineering professionals in their own environment surfaces high-value workflows that would be impossible to understand from a traditional product org. What you build in the field creates immediate impact and becomes the foundation for every deployment after it.