Forward Deployed Engineer

Here’s a cleaned-up version that protects the client’s identity while preserving the role’s substance and appeal:

Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: Seattle, WA (Hybrid)
Compensation: $110,000–$180,000 base salary, depending on experience

About the Company

Our client is an early-stage, venture-backed AI company building intelligent automation solutions for the insurance industry. Its platform uses AI agents, including voice-based agents, to help insurance agencies streamline customer engagement, sales, renewals, quality assurance, and other operational workflows.

The company is led by an experienced founding team with backgrounds spanning artificial intelligence, engineering, insurance, and strategy. This is an opportunity to join a fast-moving startup where engineers work closely with customers, influence the product roadmap, and solve complex problems with significant real-world impact.

About the Role

We are hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to own customer implementations from initial discovery through production launch and expansion.

You will work directly with insurance agencies to understand how their teams operate, integrate the company’s AI agents with existing systems, and turn complex, often undocumented workflows into reliable production solutions.

Building the AI agent is only part of the challenge. The harder and more important work is making it function successfully within each customer’s existing environment.

Some customer systems have modern APIs and clear documentation. Others rely on legacy technology, incomplete documentation, or manual processes. You will determine what to integrate, automate, customize, or work around while identifying solutions that can be reused across future customer deployments.

This role combines software engineering, AI implementation, systems integration, and customer-facing problem-solving.

What You’ll Do

• Own customer deployments from initial scoping through implementation, go-live, and adoption

• Partner directly with agency owners, operations leaders, and end users to understand their workflows

• Translate customer processes and institutional knowledge into technical requirements and system designs

• Build integrations with third-party platforms, APIs, telephony tools, and legacy systems

• Configure and improve AI agents across prompts, tools, evaluations, and workflows

• Diagnose and resolve technical issues that could delay or disrupt customer launches

• Build custom solutions that allow the platform to fit each customer’s operating environment

• Identify additional use cases and expansion opportunities within existing accounts

• Recognize common problems across deployments and turn them into reusable product or platform improvements

• Create connectors, configuration layers, evaluation tools, runbooks, and other resources that accelerate future implementations

• Work closely with the founders and product team to shape the company’s technical and customer strategy

What Success Looks Like

Within 30 Days

• Develop a strong understanding of the platform, including prompts, tools, evaluations, telephony, and customer integrations

• Participate in customer calls and active implementation projects

• Begin building relationships with customers

• Ship initial improvements such as prompt updates, tool fixes, integration enhancements, or new evaluation cases

Within 60 Days

• Independently diagnose and resolve customer issues

• Deliver fixes and customizations that unblock customer launches

• Adapt AI agents to fit the way customers operate in practice

• Identify and scope an additional use case within an existing customer account

Within 90 Days

• Build or design a reusable improvement that makes future deployments faster and more reliable

• Identify recurring failure patterns and turn them into product-level solutions

• Help ensure that common implementation problems are solved once and incorporated back into the platform

What We’re Looking For

Strong Software Engineering Fundamentals

• At least two years of experience shipping production software

• Strong Python development skills

• Experience building and integrating APIs

• Comfort working across multiple interconnected systems

• Experience with voice or telephony platforms such as Twilio is a strong plus

Production AI Experience

• Experience shipping at least one AI or LLM-powered application to real users

• Understanding of the challenges involved in making AI systems reliable and consistent in production

• Experience designing evaluations that identify meaningful regressions and real-world failure cases

• Familiarity with prompt development, tool use, agent workflows, and production monitoring

Comfort With Complex Systems

• Willingness to work with legacy systems, incomplete documentation, unclear schemas, and undocumented endpoints

• Ability to reverse-engineer integrations and collaborate directly with third-party vendors

• A practical approach to deciding when to build, configure, automate, or create a workaround

Customer-Facing Communication

• Genuine interest in working directly with customers

• Ability to translate operational knowledge into technical requirements

• Confidence communicating technical concepts to both technical and nontechnical audiences

• Strong discovery skills and the ability to uncover how work is actually completed

End-to-End Ownership

• Ability to discover a need, design and build the solution, launch it, and ensure it is adopted

• Willingness to remain hands-on throughout implementation and go-live

• Strong judgment when working with incomplete information and changing requirements

High Initiative

• Experience at an early-stage startup, launching an independent project, or owning ambiguous work without an established playbook

• Ability to move quickly, make thoughtful decisions, and challenge assumptions constructively

• Interdisciplinary curiosity and an interest in solving problems across engineering, AI, operations, and customer experience

Willingness to Travel

Customers are located throughout the United States, and occasional travel may be required to support implementations and on-site discovery.

Why Join

• Join an early-stage, well-funded AI company addressing a large and underserved industry

• Own meaningful customer deployments with visible business impact

• Work directly with the founding team and influence the product’s direction

• Solve challenging problems across AI, integrations, telephony, and workflow automation

• Help establish the processes and reusable infrastructure that will support the company’s next stage of growth