Forward Deployed Engineer

Sarah Smith Fund; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

The Sarah Smith Fund is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to connect its platform with enterprise clients. The successful candidate will write production code, build custom solutions, and work closely with clients to enhance their workflows. This role requires expertise in Python and TypeScript, along with a strong understanding of cloud fundamentals.

You'll be responsible for delivering impactful solutions and translating customer needs into platform capabilities. Join a dynamic team and thrive in a customer-facing, engineering role.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience shipping production software.
• Experience working with cloud services, containers, and CI/CD.
• Ability to communicate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Embed with strategic accounts to understand their needs.
• Build custom integrations and solutions for client workflows.
• Act as a trusted technical partner throughout customer engagement.
• Prototype and get solutions into production quickly.
• Translate customer feedback into reusable platform capabilities.

Skills

Production software shipping experience

Customer communication

Prototyping and validation

Cloud and infrastructure fundamentals

Integration mindset

Security awareness

Curiosity for learning new domains

Tools

Python

TypeScript

AWS

Postgres/SQL

Temporal

Redis

Job description

The Role:

We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to be the bridge between F2's platform and the real-world complexity of our most important enterprise clients. You'll embed with strategic Private Credit customers, get deep on their data, workflows, and infrastructure, and build custom solutions that makes F2 indispensable to how they operate. This is a hands-on engineering role: you write production code, you ship it and you see your work create value in days, not quarters.

You'll spend the majority of your time in the field with customers, then bring what you learn back to our core engineering and product teams to make the platform better for everyone. It's the ideal role for an engineer who wants to combine deep technical work with direct customer impact, and who's excited to learn a modern AI stack end-to-end.

What you'll do:

• Embed with strategic accounts. Sit with our top enterprise clients to deeply understand their domain, data sources, security requirements, and analyst workflows and then translate those into concrete technical solutions.
• Build custom integrations and solutions. Write production code on top of F2's platform: connectors to customer data rooms and document management systems, ingestion pipelines, workflow automations, and domain-specific features tailored to each client's needs.
• Own the technical relationship. Act as the trusted technical partner for the customer's team throughout the engagement; from initial deployment and configuration through production rollout and optimization.
• Prototype, validate, ship. Move fast: build a prototype, put it in front of the customer, iterate on real feedback, and get it into production through our CI/CD pipelines while meeting our engineering standards.
• Generalize back into the platform. Return from engagements and work with core engineering and product to turn one-off customer solutions into reusable abstractions and platform capabilities that scale across our entire customer base.
• Be the voice of the customer. Bring hard-won field insights back to the roadmap, championing the features and integrations that solve real enterprise problems.
• Work alongside core engineering. Participate in shared code review, architecture discussions, you're a full member of the engineering org, not a siloed services team.

What you bring:

• Hands-on full-stack or backend engineering. 3+ years shipping production software, ideally with Python and/or TypeScript. You're comfortable owning a feature end-to-end across an unfamiliar codebase.
• Customer-facing instincts. You communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and you enjoy being in the room with customers translating ambiguous requirements into working software.
• Pragmatic and fast. You prototype, validate, and ship in days and weeks, not months. You'd rather get something real in front of a customer than perfect a diagram.
• Comfort with cloud and infra fundamentals. Working familiarity with AWS, containers, CI/CD, and Postgres/SQL. Experience with Temporal, Redis, and LLM tooling is a strong plus.
• Integration mindset. Experience building connectors, APIs, or ETL/data pipelines against messy real-world data sources and enterprise systems.
• Security awareness. You understand why enterprise clients care about tenant isolation, least-privilege access, and data handling, and you build with those constraints in mind.
• Builder's curiosity. You enjoy learning a new domain (private markets / finance) and a full AI application stack, and you thrive in a 0-1 environment where you own outcomes.