Forward Deployed Engineer

String; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Beautiful office in Midtown

Meals at office

Annual international offsite

Flexible PTO

Job summary

String is building the most comprehensive platform to collect and structure data from the web. We’re hiring our founding FDE in NYC to own customer requests end to end and to shape the product roadmap with the engineering team.

You will work directly with the largest hedge funds and top startups, solving scraping challenges, building scalable pipelines, and delivering high value data products. Competitive base salary with equity await.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of engineering experience.
• At least 1 year working directly with customers.
• Strong problem solving and analytical skills.
• Ability to thrive in unstructured startup environments.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with our largest customers to solve their scraping problems.
• Own customer requests end to end to ensure they’re beyond happy.
• This energy: 'What do you want? Cool, we'll build it.' Come back the next day and say, ‘Did this fix your problem? What else do you want?’
• Help define the product roadmap for our broader engineering team - you’re at the frontlines and have the most context into what customers are requesting
• Manage our scraping engineers who will report directly to you - they help build & maintain scraper pipelines for our customers.

Skills

Engineering experience

Customer interaction

Problem solving

High intellect

Job description

Compensation 75th+ percentile for geo and experience + market leading equity

Hey this is Rohit (CEO/co-founder) writing this. I find most JDs to be quite impersonal and bland. We do things a bit differently here at String. So to start off, I appreciate you for taking the time to read this and for considering us.

We’re building the most comprehensive platform to collect and structure data from the web.

Customers ranging from the world’s largest hedge funds to seed-stage startups use String to pull 30M+ rows of structured web data per week (that’s literally 50+ rows every second).

We’re generating 7 figures in ARR and are growing double digit % MoM. We have found initial PMF and are now building our delivery team to accelerate growth. We’ve done everything so far with a lean team of < 10 people and we recently raised a seed round (unannounced) from leading VCs and angels in our space (Auren Hoffman, Charlie Songhurst, and many more).

We’re working with the best. We are known in our niche of finance as the best product and therefore are working with most of the largest hedge funds, PE, and VC firms. You will get the opportunity to work directly with decision makers at these firms and help them win.

We are looking for the right person to join us as our founding FDE on this exciting journey! If you want to help build our FDE function from the ground up and operate well in unstructured environments, we would love to meet you!

What do we do

Today any business that wants to collect web data has to jump through many hoops:

• Build infrastructure to send thousands of requests to websites
• Build technology to avoid getting detected as a bot (very hard to do at scale)
• Code individual scripts for every website they want to scrape
• Fix all those scripts as websites change, and
• Ensure consistent data quality across runs

We solve all of these problems for them so that they never have to worry about scraping. Thus, we 1) significantly improve their end products driving millions in revenue and 2) save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in engineering costs.

Our end customers use our product to

• Make better decisions. E.g. how much is Lululemon discounting their products and should I therefore buy their stock.
• Fundamentally support their core products. E.g. I’m an AI legal tech company and need to scrape tons of laws across state & local government websites.

Building this would have been impossible before the AI revolution. We have a unique opportunity to build the first platform where anyone can collect structured data across any website with just a prompt. And we’re excited to be at the forefront of solving this problem for our customers.

What will you do

• Work directly with our largest customers to solve their scraping problems
• Own customer requests end to end to ensure they’re beyond happy
• This is the energy we’re looking for: ‘What do you want? Cool, we'll build it.’ Come back the next day and say, ‘Did this fix your problem? What else do you want?’
• Help define the product roadmap for our broader engineering team - you’re at the frontlines and have the most context into what customers are requesting
• Manage our scraping engineers who will report directly to you - they help build & maintain scraper pipelines for our customers.

Who are we looking for

• 3+ years of engineering experience
• 1+ years of experience directly working with customers in some capacity (solutions engineering, technical account manager, sales engineer etc)
• High raw intellectual horsepower and creative problem solving
• Proven success in improving NPS and/or sales velocity of an organization
• Based in or willing to move to NYC

Nice to haves:

• Experience at a early/growth stage startup
• Has worked with our ICPs or buyer profiles before (head of data, investment analyst, founder)

It’s not often that a startup is hiring their first FDE after hitting 7 figures in ARR and in initial stages of PMF. The list of companies is a handful when you filter for NYC, which we believe is the best city to live in! For the right person, this will be an opportunity for immense career growth both to own responsibility beyond the typical engineering role and to move into managing other engineers much faster than otherwise possible.

This role will transform your career and give you the badge to go on to whatever you want to do next. We believe you’ll have the skills to be a 10x asset to any startup you join in the future - the type of person that hot startups want as an early executive. Or to start your own company.

We’re in a unique time in history where AI is giving engineers unprecedented leverage. However, our customers can’t leverage this for scraping because they still get blocked by antibot, they don’t have the infra to scale scrapes, they haven’t built data quality validation etc. We’ve solved all of these core challenges and now need to best help them wherever they are in their scraping journey. You’ll be at the frontlines of helping the biggest financial and tech institutions solve these pain points.

• Initial conversation with Rohit (30 mins)
• Code challenge with engineer (45 mins)
• Systems design interview with Logan (45 mins)
• Culture interview with founders (1 hour, ideally in person)

Values & team

Feel free to read through our team values to see if working with us will be a good fit for you. If you get excited from reading the values page, it’s likely a good fit and vice versa.

Logan (CTO) : Leading engineering and has extensive web scraping & AI experience. Ships like a 10 person engineering team (Rohit bragging for him). Previously worked as the founding engineer at Nourish (YC W21, now unicorn) and as a software engineer at C3 AI. Has arbitraged Polymarket, frontran ICOs & Coinbase listings, and wrote a chess engine. TLDR has spedrun the full tech bro starter pack.

Rohit (CEO) : Leading GTM and has signed dozens of enterprise deals including 6 of the 10 largest hedge funds while spending half his time coding. Previously worked as a consultant at Bain and cofounded two startups in college, one of them with Logan called CampusOven.

Engineers: We have 7 more great engineers on the team who help build and maintain the full end to end product. We’re lucky to have such passionate and thoughtful engineers on the team.

Sales: We recently onboarded 2 great AEs to help accelerate growth.

We’re building an exceptional team and so want to be generous on compensation. Our philosophy is that base compensation is for living expenses and equity is for upside. We want you to be able to give your all and benefit proportionately from your contributions, without worrying about living expenses.

So our compensation structure is a base salary competitive with other seed stage startups and generous equity relative to other startups. We know that part of the excitement of joining a startup is the upside and to feel like an owner - that’s why we left our corporate jobs.

More concrete information:

• 140k-160k base, 0.1%-0.5% equity (US based only)
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Beautiful office in Midtown
• Meals comped at office and tons of snacks
• Annual international offsite (and additional travel)
• Flexible PTO