Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: New York City — Hybrid, with remote flexibility

Employment type: Full-time

Department: Engineering

Travel: Up to 50%

About Westfold Innovations

Westfold Innovations builds applied AI systems that help organizations transform complex, high-value workflows. We work closely with our customers to understand how their businesses operate, identify where technology can create meaningful leverage, and build reliable software that delivers measurable results in production.

We are a small, ambitious team of engineers and operators who value speed, technical depth, direct ownership, and genuine customer impact. We believe the best products emerge when the people building them work closely with the people using them.

About the Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Westfold Innovations, you will work at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer delivery. You will partner directly with customers to understand their most important problems, design the right technical approach, and build solutions that move from prototype to production.

This is not a traditional implementation or solutions-engineering role. You will write production code, make architectural decisions, work with real-world data and systems, and own deployments end to end. Depending on the engagement, you might build an AI-powered workflow, integrate with a customer’s existing infrastructure, design an evaluation framework, or turn a successful customer solution into a reusable part of the Westfold platform.

You will operate with significant autonomy and often with incomplete information. The right person is equally comfortable debugging an API integration, discussing architecture with a customer’s engineering team, presenting progress to an executive stakeholder, and determining what must be built next.

What You’ll Do

• Own customer deployments from initial discovery and technical scoping through implementation, production rollout, and adoption.

• Embed closely with customer teams to understand their workflows, systems, constraints, and measures of success.

• Translate business problems into clear technical requirements, system designs, and sequenced delivery plans.

• Design, build, and deploy production-grade applications across the stack, including APIs, data pipelines, backend services, user interfaces, and AI-powered workflows.

• Integrate Westfold’s platform with customer data, infrastructure, authentication systems, and third-party services.

• Prototype rapidly, test assumptions with users, and iterate based on evidence.

• Establish evaluations, monitoring, and feedback loops that measure system quality, reliability, adoption, and business impact.

• Make thoughtful tradeoffs among speed, scope, maintainability, security, and performance.

• Identify technical and organizational risks early and take ownership of removing blockers.

• Communicate clearly with stakeholders ranging from individual engineers and operators to senior executives.

• Bring insights from customer deployments back to Westfold’s product and engineering teams.

• Turn successful implementations into reusable components, tools, documentation, and deployment playbooks.

• Help shape the culture, technical standards, and operating practices of Westfold’s Forward Deployed Engineering team.

• Travel to customer locations as needed to accelerate delivery, strengthen relationships, and support adoption.

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Have 2+ years of experience building and shipping production software.

• Are a strong programmer with experience in Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, or comparable languages.

• Can work across multiple layers of a system and are comfortable moving between backend services, data infrastructure, APIs, cloud environments, and user-facing applications.

• Have owned technically complex projects from an ambiguous starting point through successful production deployment.

• Enjoy working directly with customers and can uncover the underlying problem behind an initial request.

• Communicate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Exercise sound judgment under pressure and can make progress without waiting for perfect information.

• Take responsibility for outcomes, not simply assigned tasks or completed features.

• Learn unfamiliar industries, tools, and technical systems quickly.

• Are willing and able to travel up to 50%.

Especially Helpful Experience

• Building applications using large language models, multimodal models, agents, retrieval systems, or other machine-learning technologies.

• Designing evaluations and observability for AI systems.

• Working with cloud infrastructure such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

• Building data pipelines or distributed systems that process large or sensitive datasets.

• Integrating with enterprise systems, including identity providers, data warehouses, CRMs, ERPs, and internal APIs.

• Navigating security reviews, compliance requirements, procurement processes, or regulated environments.

• Working in an early-stage startup, technical consulting organization, or other fast-moving customer-facing engineering environment.

• Founding, launching, or independently owning a product or substantial technical project.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first several months, you will have developed a strong understanding of Westfold’s product and customers, taken ownership of a meaningful deployment, and shipped software that is being used in production.

Over time, your impact will extend beyond individual engagements. The solutions, insights, and reusable systems you develop will improve Westfold’s core product, make future deployments faster, and influence how we approach some of our customers’ most consequential problems.

We measure success through production adoption, system reliability, customer outcomes, delivery velocity, and the degree to which lessons from the field strengthen the broader Westfold platform.

Why Join Westfold

• Work on technically challenging problems with visible, real-world consequences.

• Own projects from the first customer conversation through production deployment.

• Build across the stack rather than being limited to a narrow technical surface.

• Work directly with the people whose problems you are solving.

• Influence the product roadmap through firsthand experience in the field.

• Join an early team with meaningful responsibility and room to shape how the company operates.

• Receive competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and comprehensive benefits.

Compensation and Benefits

Base salary: $200,000–$300,000. This role also includes meaningful equity, comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, unlimited PTO, and a 401(k) with a dollar-for-dollar employer match of up to 4% of eligible compensation.

Westfold Innovations is an equal opportunity employer.