Forward Deployed Engineer (Contract) 3–5 years Remote, Bengaluru

Realfast; Bengaluru; Remote; INR 1,200,000 - 2,400,000; Full time

Job summary

Realfast, India's first post-AI IT services company, is hiring forward deployed engineers to join our production-focused delivery teams. You will work with founders and clients, shipping production software that meets SLAs, leveraging AI agents to accelerate delivery.

You bring 3–5 years of software engineering experience, strong coding discipline across languages, and comfort in ambiguous environments. You value quality, craft, and rapid iteration.

Qualifications

• 3-5 years of software engineering experience.
• Strong coding skills across multiple languages.
• Comfort working without a map in ambiguous environments.
• Appreciation for how businesses make money with software.
• Clear, precise prose and ability to reason in writing.

Responsibilities

• Build stuff that solves real problems - directly with customers, using whatever tech gets the job done best
• Get your hands dirty across front-end, back-end, data pipelines, and AI models
• Operate in cockpit mode. You steer. Your agents execute.
• Make smart trade-offs between elegant code and shipping fast.
• Have room to chase rabbit holes that might unlock a better way to build.
• Help us hire by spotting people who can operate at this speed

Skills

Software engineering

AI integration

Frontend development

Backend development

Data pipelines

Tools

Git

Jira

Salesforce

Ashby

Job description

We hire forward deployed engineers full-time and on contract. Some of the best engineers we've worked with don't want a full-time job, and we'd rather work with them on their terms than not at all. It suits us as well: contract lets us size a team to the work instead of to headcount. The bar doesn't move either way — same assignment, same rounds, same standard once you're in.

realfast is India's first post-AI IT services company, built from scratch around one metric: how quickly a signed contract becomes working software a client is paying for. Founded by the team that scaled Gojek and backed by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India & SEA) and RTP Global.

Our platform, Exo, powers the entire delivery operation. It ingests client documentation, codebases, and requirements within hours, compressing weeks of traditional discovery into days, then works alongside our teams to deliver production-ready solutions. We've delivered production-ready solutions in days that traditionally take months. The methodology behind this is Real Agile, built specifically for how IT services works in the AI era.

We hire for judgment, because everything that doesn't require it is already automated. What's left is the job.

Put more precisely: we hire people who have a high need for cognition. David Brooks, writing in The Atlantic:

“What will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort. Right now, some people have what psychologists call a high need for cognition. They enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games and reading dense books. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity not to do it.”

His other line from that piece: when intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable. That’s what we’re hiring for.

We hire forward deployed engineers full-time and on contract. Some of the best engineers we've worked with don't want a full-time job, and we'd rather work with them on their terms than not at all. It suits us as well: contract lets us size a team to the work instead of to headcount. The bar doesn't move either way — same assignment, same rounds, same standard once you're in.

Here's what we're looking for

A hacker-coded engineer - someone who'd rather build the tool than wait for it. You've shipped in ambiguous environments. You've picked up unfamiliar stacks and made them work. You've sat with a customer, figured out what actually matters, and built the thing that moved the number.

You understand why the business cares about what you're building - not just how to build it. You've already started using AI agents and coding assistants to do work better - faster, at a quality level that wasn't possible eighteen months ago. Here, you take that all the way.

The problems change constantly - Salesforce integrations one week, data pipelines the next, an AI agent the week after. You're embedded in client delivery, working directly with the founders, shipping production software that hits SLAs and moves metrics the client cares about. What stays constant: you ship fast and to a high bar. Beautiful work done quickly. Everything else is negotiable.

What you'll do

Build stuff that solves real problems - directly with customers, using whatever tech gets the job done best

Get your hands dirty across front-end, back-end, data pipelines, and AI models

Operate in cockpit mode. You steer. Your agents execute. Claude Code, Codex, and others write code, run tests, open PRs, update tickets, read and prioritise your email - GitHub, Jira, Salesforce, Ashby, calendar, all of it. You engage with these systems through your agents, not around them

Make smart trade-offs between elegant code and shipping fast

Have room to chase rabbit holes that might unlock a better way to build

Help us hire by spotting people who can operate at this speed

What you'll bring

3-5 years of software engineering experience

Strong coding skills across multiple languages - which ones don't matter, but discipline and craft do

Appreciation for how businesses make money with software

Comfort working without a map in ambiguous environments

Deep mastery of your craft — engineering, BA, QA, design, whatever your domain. You know good from mediocre on sight. Without that judgement, you can't raise an agent's bar, and raising the bar is the job

You're comfortable in a terminal. Not a shell wizard — but you live in one, and it doesn't faze you

At realfast, everyone codes — just like everyone communicates. You use agents to build small apps, scripts, and tools that make your own life better. Here you take that all the way

You already spend hours every day working with AI coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, or the equivalent. If you don't, the pace here will feel alien

Git is how we collaborate — not just engineers, everyone. You don't need to walk in fluent, but you need to be comfortable learning fast

Clear, precise prose. You can reason through a problem in writing, explain your thinking to a colleague, and direct an AI agent with the same clarity. The quality of your reasoning on paper directly determines the quality of your output

You read books. Not blog posts, not threads — books. The depth of thinking you bring to work comes from the depth of thinking you take in, and nothing substitutes for the long-form argument

Backgrounds we'd consider

Software engineer at a startup or product company who's shipped full-stack features end-to-end and cares deeply about how the code reads, not just that it works

Developer at a consultancy or agency who's worked directly with clients across varied tech stacks and brought craft to every one of them

QA engineer who codes, automates, and has strong opinions about how software should be built — and is using AI to raise the bar on what "tested" means

Designer who builds — prototypes in code, ships production UI, and is figuring out how AI changes what one person can make

Business analyst or PM who's crossed into hands‑on development, cares about the quality of what ships, and wants to stay in the building

DevOps or platform engineer who's built applications, not just infrastructure, and is exploring how AI agents change the craft of delivery

Other equivalent IC roles where you've combined hands‑on building with a drive to elevate the quality of everything around you

This role is for you if

AI tools are already part of how you work — you use them for research, drafting, analysis, and can't imagine going back

You take pride in craft. Mediocre output from an agent bothers you, and you push until it isn't

You're a polyglot engineer who loves to create working solutions, not just write code

You want to use AI to drive concrete business outcomes - not just build cool tech

You're obsessed with quality and craft - and you're figuring out how to use AI to elevate both

You want to turn state‑of‑the‑art research into reliable production systems

You care why the business needs a thing, not just how to build it

You want to operate across engineering, delivery, and client context

This role is NOT for you if

You find terminals anxiety-inducing

You don't code and don't intend to start

You're not willing to learn git

You struggle to express your reasoning clearly in writing

You haven't woven AI tools into how you work

You want to do the work yourself rather than direct agents to do it better and faster

You don't read books

You need detailed specs, clear boundaries, and extensive guidance to be productive

You're looking for a purely coding‑focused role

You'd rather specialise narrowly than be dangerous across the stack

If that's the work you want, not the story of it, we'd like to hear from you.