Forward-Deployed Engineer

Specter; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Specter is seeking a forward-deployed engineer who sits with customers to understand their reconciliation workflows and translate those insights into practical product configurations and integrations. You will embed with clients, access their ERP and spreadsheets, and turn detailed processes into deployable solutions.

The role emphasizes hands-on problem solving in real-world finance environments, with travel to customer sites and a bias toward shipping working integrations over slides.

Qualifications

• Engineering mindset with interest or background in finance and accounting.
• Ability to read complex reconciliation data and identify patterns.
• Willingness to travel for on-site engagements (e.g., manufacturing plant).
• Bias toward delivering working integrations over presentations.

Responsibilities

• Embed with customers by accessing their ERP, spreadsheets, Slack, and AP inbox to learn actual processes.
• Build customer-specific configurations, integrations, and workflows; ship within days.
• Translate customer learnings into core product and inform future features.
• Own onboarding and time-to-value; ensure first real reconciliation within the first week.
• Be the eyes and ears for customers in the field and capture insights for product teams.

Skills

Engineering background

Finance knowledge

Analytical mindset

Learning agility

Tools

SQL

Job description

Every Specter customer has a different chart of accounts, a different ERP, a different definition of "the close," and a different person who's been doing reconciliations the same way since 2009. The forward-deployed engineer is the person who sits with that customer, understands their actual process at the level of detail that nobody outside the company has bothered to learn, and turns it into something our agents can run.

This is one of the highest-leverage roles at the company. You make customers successful in the short term, and what you learn becomes product in the long term. If you're the kind of engineer who gets bored without a real-world problem in front of you, this is the role.

What you'll do

• Embed with customers. Get into their ERP, their spreadsheets, their Slack, their AP inbox. Learn how the work actually happens - not how the org chart says it happens.
• Build customer-specific configurations, integrations, agent workflows, and one-off tooling. Ship them within days, not quarters.
• Translate what you learn into the core product. The patterns you see across customers are the next features, and the friction you see is the next thing to fix at the platform level.
• Own onboarding and time-to-value. New customers should be running their first real reconciliation through Specter inside the first week.
• Be the company's eyes and ears in the field. Bring back the things customers won't say in a sales call but will say to an engineer at their kitchen table.

What we look for

• Engineer first, customer-facing second. You can read a 200-row reconciliation spreadsheet and find the structural pattern in it before the customer finishes explaining it to you.
• Comfort with finance and accounting concepts, or strong appetite to learn them fast. We'll teach you what a suspense account is; you teach us how to automate it.
• Willingness to fly to a manufacturing plant in Ohio if that's what it takes. The best work in this role doesn't happen on Zoom.
• Bias for shipping over slideware. The deliverable is a working integration, not a deck.

Nice to have

• Prior experience at a forward-deployed team (Palantir, Ramp Implementations, Stripe Solutions, similar).
• Background in accounting, controllership, audit, or finance operations.
• Comfort writing SQL against an unfamiliar schema with no documentation.