Forward Deployed Engineer

The Token Playbook; Austin, Northern (TX, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Vertalo is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to sit with a prospect’s technical team, build working proofs of value, and drive the path from first conversation to production use. You will code against real data using the platform API and MCP tools, ensuring a seamless technical sale and delivery.

You will require deep knowledge of AI agentic approaches and typed GraphQL APIs, and you will collaborate closely with platform engineers to deliver value after a deal is closed.

Qualifications

• Shipped production code in a customer-facing role.
• Demonstrated fluency with agentic AI tools.
• Comfort with regulated financial infrastructure (transfer agency, funds, broker-dealers).
• Ability to discern when a proof of value is complete versus a demo.

Responsibilities

• Run technical discovery translating issuer problems into platform capabilities.
• Build live proofs of value against the GraphQL API and MCP server.
• Lead delivery with core platform engineers after winning engagements.
• Provide feedback to engineering based on real-client integration challenges.

Skills

Production code

Agentic AI

Regulated finance

Proof of value

Tools

MCP server

Job description

ABOUT THE ROLE

Forward Deployed Engineers are the technical builders of the commercial team. You are a hybrid of sales, product, and engineering. You sit with a prospect's technical people and stand up a working proof of value rather than describing one. You write code, you call the real API, and you build on the prospect's own data.

You are not the relationship owner and you are not a solution architect who stops at a diagram. The measure of the work is whether a prospect watched their own issuance run on Vertalo and believed it.

This is the role the broader software market has spent the last two years learning to hire. The firms that field it well are converting pilots into production while everyone else is still demoing.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Run technical discovery. Translate a transfer agent or issuer problem into something the platform can address today.
• Build live proofs of value against the real typed GraphQL API and the write-capable MCP server, with the confirmation gates visible on screen.
• Take integration risk off the table early, so the technical sale and the eventual delivery are one path instead of two fights.
• Feed competitive product ideas back into engineering, informed by where the API and the integration actually break for real clients.
• After the close, lead delivery alongside the core platform engineers on the engagements you helped win.

TWO NON-NEGOTIABLES

1. A deep understanding of AI, and of how agentic approaches change tokenization. You can show a prospect what Vertalo does today, and also demonstrate how an AI agent operating the platform through the write-capable MCP surface changes what their own business can do.
2. A deep working knowledge of typed GraphQL APIs and MCP tools, enough to lead clients into the deeper capabilities those interfaces expose. The path from a first conversation to a gated, agent-driven issuance is something you can walk a client through and stand up live.

EXPERIENCE

• Shipped production code against a customer's own data and constraints, in a customer-facing role.
• Working fluency in agentic AI tools, demonstrated rather than described.
• Comfort in regulated financial infrastructure: transfer agency, fund administration, broker-dealers, cap tables, or securities settlement.
• The judgment to know when a proof of value is finished and when it is a demo wearing a costume.

COMPENSATION

$180,000 to $220,000 base plus equity, depending on experience. The 2026 market band for forward deployed engineering runs $130,000 to $260,000 in base alone, so this sits inside it on cash. The early equity and the chance to build the first write-capable agent surface for regulated securities are the part of the package a number alone does not carry.

ABOUT VERTALO

Vertalo is an SEC-registered digital transfer agent and tokenization platform, and the company behind Agentic Tokenization and Transfer Agency: an API-first system in which AI agents, working through the Vertalo MCP server, carry out the issuance, transfer, and recordkeeping that has always depended on specialist humans and slow point-to-point integrations. The MCP server is not a roadmap item. It is working today, in controlled pilot with early adopters.

Vertalo is all-in on AI, used across the company rather than in marketing or in a single feature. Every role carries an AI mandate inside its own discipline.

Vertalo does not hire to a number. Roles are phased in as the right candidates are identified, and they are defined by demonstrated experience, mindset, and potential rather than a fixed checklist, because the work sits at the intersection of several disciplines.