The role
- COMP
- $175K - $255K
- EQUITY
- Competitive equity
- LOCATION
- San Francisco
- WORKPLACE
- On-site
- EXPERIENCE
- 1 - 5 years
- VISA
- None
- STACK
- Python
- INDUSTRY
- AI, Logistics, Manufacturing, Government, B2B
/roles — ROLE_387
Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
Early-stage AI startup deploying agents into procurement and supply chain operations at large manufacturers
The company
Enterprise agentic-automation company scaling intelligent automation across procurement and operations functions.
- STAGE
- seed-stage
- FUNDING
- seed funding
- TEAM
- founding team of <10
JD — the work
About the role
You would be the company's engineer on the ground, embedding AI agents into the sourcing and planning operations of some of the biggest manufacturers anywhere. The work blends writing production code, defining new use cases with current customers, and designing how deployments run, together with the founders. The founders come from academic research on LLMs and mathematical optimization, and the very small team works in person every weekday in San Francisco.
What you'll do
- Manage day-to-day relationships with current manufacturing customers and their IT, procurement, and planning teams to find new use cases
- Ship production code within customer environments, generalizing each solution so it carries over to other accounts
- Take deployments from discovery to go-live, owning results like inventory levels, sourcing efficiency, and forecast accuracy
- Spend 15 to 30% of your time traveling to customer plants, including in Europe and Asia
- Bring field lessons back to platform engineering so each new deployment goes faster and more smoothly
What they're looking for
- Real full-stack engineering depth: you independently write production software in enterprise settings, not only solutions work
- Hands-on ownership of customer deployments alongside actual operators, beyond building internal features
- Strong communication plus the discipline to ask questions and understand a problem fully before proposing a fix
- Time at a scaling startup or in a forward-deployed role; careers spent only at large tech companies fit less well
- Living in San Francisco, working in person every weekday, and up for 15 to 30% international travel