Forward Deployed Engineer, AI Agent Infrastructure

On-site (San Francisco, CA) · $100K–$220K · 1 opening

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**About the company**

An early-stage, seed-funded AI startup building the foundational infrastructure that powers internal AI agents for large, complex organizations, including government agencies, hospitals, banks, and Fortune 500 enterprises. The platform provides the core building blocks needed to deploy agents securely at scale across regulated environments, and already supports multiple model providers and agent harnesses in production.

**The role**

You'll own enterprise deployments end-to-end, from requirements discovery through live production, as the single person accountable for each account. You'll sit directly with customers across government, healthcare, and enterprise, standing up agent pipelines and iterating until the outcome is provably working. This spans everything from bare-metal GPU deployments and open-source model work to running detailed requirements sessions with customer teams. This is a founding deployment hire reporting directly into engineering.

**What you'll do**

- Own the full lifecycle of each enterprise account, from initial requirements discovery through agent pipeline setup, deployment, and iteration

- Deploy the platform onto customer infrastructure, including bare-metal GPU environments, open-source model work, Docker containers, and Kubernetes orchestration for regulated environments

- Gather requirements, generate sample data, build evals and benchmarks, and define success criteria directly with customer stakeholders

- Run structured requirements sessions with enterprise and government customers, asking the right questions to surface what a working deployment actually looks like

- Manage three to four active accounts simultaneously once ramped, looping in core engineering as needed while remaining the single accountable owner

- Hand off mature accounts and expand scope as customers grow, helping the deployment function scale

**What you must bring**

- A strong technical foundation: able to deploy open-source models, work with Docker and Kubernetes, and debug production systems end-to-end without hand-holding

- Excellent customer-facing communication skills, with genuine comfort owning calls with government, hospital, and enterprise stakeholders and running structured requirements sessions

- High resourcefulness and organization, with the ability to run multiple accounts in parallel and escalate precisely when needed

- 0–6 years of experience in a deployment, forward-deployed, or technically customer-facing engineering role, or equivalent demonstrated ownership

- Willingness to work in-person in San Francisco, five days a week, at an intense, high-ownership, milestone-driven pace

**Nice to have**

- Prior forward-deployed engineering experience at a company with a similar FDE motion

- A technical consultancy background — having sold, scoped, and delivered client engagements with a technical component

- Entrepreneurial side projects, a small consultancy, or experience solving customer problems under real resource constraints

- Exposure to bare-metal GPU infrastructure, open-source model deployment, or fine-tuning in a production context

- Experience working with customers outside the United States

**Compensation & logistics**

- $100K–$220K base salary plus 0.3%–1.5% equity

- Milestone-based performance bonuses

- Fully in-person in San Francisco, five days a week

- 1 opening

- Not open to any visa sponsorship — candidates must already be authorized to work in the US

**This isn't the right fit if**

- Your forward-deployed background is non-technical

- You have no startup or customer-facing experience of any kind

- You're unable to relocate to San Francisco (only considered in exceptional circumstances)

- You're looking for a lower-intensity role without milestone-driven expectations