Engineering Forward‐Deployed Engineer, Generalist Full‐time Remote (US) View role →

Topsail; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote‑first culture

Equity

Frontier AI budget and ample tokens

Job summary

Topsail, a growing, remote‑first AI services company, is hiring a Generalist Forward‑Deployed Engineer to own client end‑to‑end engagements. You will map business processes, build the data foundation, and deploy agents on top of it, operating across industries with the founders.

Remote work with regular travel to client sites, reporting to the founders. You will run multiple engagements concurrently, designing ontology, enterprise data flows, and model‑agnostic agent platforms, ensuring

Qualifications

• Shipped a production system that real users depend on.
• Designed schemas for a real business domain and performed entity resolution.
• Built agents, retrieval systems, and deployment strategies from the ground up.
• Familiar with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or similar tools daily.
• Comfortable speaking with a CEO and frontline staff in the same meeting.

Responsibilities

• Run discovery with executives and frontline staff to turn vague mandates into a ranked roadmap with clear baselines.
• Model the business and install the ontology (entities, relationships, rules) from disparate sources.
• Design and ship agents, retrieval systems, and automations on the foundation, while staying model-agnostic.
• Own evals and observability; ensure measurement against baselines and user adoption.
• Train client teams to use what you built and empower them to continue building without you.

Skills

Production systems

Data modeling

Agent development

Retrieval systems

Model deployment

Cross‑functional collaboration

Tools

Claude Code

Codex

Cursor

Job description

Embed inside a growing company in any industry, build the data foundation it runs on, and deploy the agents on top. Then do it again somewhere new.

Full‑time Remote (US) Regular travel to client sites Reports to the founders

Topsail is the outsourced AI department for growing companies. A generalist forward‑deployed engineer owns a client end to end, whatever the industry. You sit with the operators, map how the business actually runs, model it, and build the data foundation that every system and every AI tool can read from. Then you deploy the agents on top of it and stay until they are running in production and people depend on them.

This is not a demo‑building role, and it is not a ticket queue. You will run two or three engagements at a time, each one a different industry, alongside the founders.

Examples of the work

• Government bids for a staffing company. An agent reads 70‑page RFPs and produces structured, compliant bids, with a custom‑trained model that predicts the winning price. Compliance went from 64% to 96%.
• Cost reporting for a multi‑site consumer services business. A function‑by‑function audit, an ROI‑ranked roadmap, then the pipeline that took the monthly government report from three days to thirteen minutes.
• Deal and investor workflows for a venture capital firm. The deal team was trained to build its own automations for sourcing and investor updates, replacing offshore spend with technology the firm owns and keeps extending.
• A company brain. One governed layer of knowledge, skills, and system connectors that every AI tool a client uses can draw on. We built it for ourselves first, then for clients.

What you will do

• Run discovery with executives and frontline staff, and turn a vague mandate into a ranked roadmap with baseline metrics the sponsor signs off on.
• Model the business and install the ontology: the entities, relationships, and rules the company runs on, resolved from spreadsheets, email, ERPs, CRMs, and the things that only live in people's heads.
• Design and ship the agents, retrieval systems, and automations that run on that foundation, model‑agnostic by default so the client can swap models without rebuilding.
• Own evals and observability for what you ship. Nothing counts until it is measured against the baseline and people are using it.
• Train client teams to use what you built, and to keep building without you.

What we look for

• You have shipped a production system that real users depend on. Not a demo, not a notebook. We will ask you to walk us through it in detail, including the parts you would do differently.
• You think in data models. You have designed schemas for a real business domain, done entity resolution on ugly data, and know where an ontology earns its keep and where it is overkill.
• You build with agents for a living. Agent SDKs, retrieval and chunking strategy, hybrid search, evals, and the tradeoffs of a deployment stack are things you have opinions about because you have been burned by them.
• You live in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar every day and can show us how.
• You are comfortable in a room with a CEO and a warehouse manager in the same afternoon, and you write clearly enough that both can follow the plan.
• You would rather own an outcome than a ticket. Ambiguity is where you do your best work.

Nice to have

• Consulting, founder, or other client‑facing experience.
• Time inside a real‑economy industry: staffing, healthcare, logistics, consumer services, finance.

What you get

• A client relationship and the systems behind it, owned by you from week one.
• A new operating problem every few months, next to the people who built the company.
• Remote‑first, with time in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Lehi, Utah when the client work calls for it.
• A serious AI budget: frontier model access, the tools you want, and a lot of tokens.

Compensation: Above‑market salary and bonus, plus meaningful equity.