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

Topsail; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Topsail is a remote-first data and AI engineering partner for private equity portfolios. We build the data foundations, deploy agents, and deliver ROI across deal sourcing, diligence, monitoring, and investor relations.

As a forward-deployed engineer, you embed with sponsor and portfolio company at once, design schemas, and ship retrieval systems. You’ll model the business, own evals, and train client teams to keep building after you.

Job description

Embed with the sponsor and the portfolio company at once. Build the data foundation and deploy the agents that move the thesis.

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

Private equity firms and their portfolio companies are where most of Topsail's work happens. A forward‑deployed engineer on this track embeds with the sponsor and the operating company at the same time. You model the business the way the deal team and the operators both need to see it, build the data foundation, and deploy the agents that move the metrics the investment thesis depends on.

You will be inside the fund as often as inside the portfolio company: deal sourcing, diligence, portfolio monitoring, and investor relations all run on the same scattered data problem, and the sponsor wants ROI they can put in a board deck.

Examples of the work

• 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.
• Government bids for a PE‑backed 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 PE‑backed 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.
• A relationship model for a fund. Every contact, company, and interaction the firm holds resolved into one source of truth, so the partners can ask who knows whom and get a sourced answer.

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 understand how a fund and a portfolio company actually operate, or you want to badly enough to learn fast. Deal flow, diligence, monitoring, LP reporting, and the operating metrics a sponsor watches.
• You can present to a partner and to a plant manager in the same week, and write clearly enough that both can follow the plan.

Nice to have

• Time in private equity, venture, investment banking, or a portfolio company operating role.
• Familiarity with the tools funds run on: Affinity, Attio, Salesforce, DealCloud, and the spreadsheets around them.

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.