Forward Deployed Engineer

VSG Recruitment; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

VSG Recruitment partners with a high-growth tech company to hire a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE). This hands-on role blends software engineering, AI, and business operations, embedding with GMs and operating teams to deploy AI-powered software that delivers measurable business outcomes.

You will own stakeholder relationships, identify high-impact workflows, build production-grade AI systems, and create repeatable patterns deployed across multiple businesses.

Qualifications

• Generalist software engineering background across the stack.
• Experience with TypeScript and/or Python, React, SQL, APIs, integrations, and modern architectures.
• Experience shipping LLM or AI-powered applications into production.
• Comfortable entering unfamiliar codebases and delivering useful software.
• Strong product and customer instincts — focus on business impact.
• Highly autonomous with ability to make technical decisions.
• Commercially minded with ability to understand business metrics.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• Comfortable working closely with customers embedded with operating teams.

Responsibilities

• Embed with operating teams: Learn how each business works and where technology can help.
• Identify high-impact opportunities: Find AI-enabled workflows that improve outcomes.
• Build and ship: Develop integrations, prompts, evaluations, and workflows for production AI.
• Operate and improve: Monitor systems, measure outcomes, and tune performance.
• Create repeatable solutions: Turn deployments into reusable playbooks.
• Own stakeholder relationships: Be a trusted technical partner to GMs and operators.

Skills

Generalist software engineering

TypeScript

Python

React

SQL

APIs

Integrations

Modern software architectures

Tools

Snowflake

Databricks

Iceberg-based data platforms

Event-driven architectures

Job description

VSG Recruitment is partnering with a high-growth technology company to hire a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE). This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who thrives at the intersection of software engineering, AI, and business operations.

You’ll embed directly with portfolio companies, working alongside GMs and operational teams to identify high-impact opportunities and build AI-powered software that delivers measurable business outcomes. This is not a consulting role , the deliverable is working software, not presentations.

What You’ll Do

• Embed with operating teams: Learn how each business works, where revenue comes from, where teams spend their time, and where technology can create meaningful leverage.

• Identify high-impact opportunities: Find the 2–3 workflows where AI and agentic software can materially improve outcomes, such as customer retention, pricing, lead enrichment, support automation, accounts receivable, engineering workflows, or operational reporting.

• Build and ship: Develop integrations, prompts, evaluations, workflows, and user-facing functionality required to deploy production-grade AI systems.

• Operate and improve: Monitor deployed systems, measure outcomes, tune performance, and determine appropriate levels of automation and human oversight.

• Create repeatable solutions: Turn successful deployments into reusable playbooks and technical patterns that can be applied across multiple businesses.

• Own stakeholder relationships: Act as a trusted technical partner to GMs and operators, translating business problems into practical software solutions.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong generalist software engineering background with the ability to work across the stack.

• Experience with TypeScript and/or Python , React, SQL, APIs, integrations, and modern software architectures.

• Experience shipping LLM or AI-powered applications into production , including evaluation, prompting, agentic workflows, and appropriate autonomy controls.

• Comfortable entering unfamiliar codebases and quickly delivering useful software.

• Strong product and customer instincts — you focus on solving the problem that materially affects the business rather than building technology for its own sake.

• Highly autonomous and comfortable making technical decisions without extensive oversight.

• Commercially minded, with an ability to understand business metrics and prioritize engineering work based on business impact.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

• Comfortable working closely with customers and spending meaningful time embedded with operating teams.

Nice to Have

• Previous Forward Deployed Engineer or similar customer-facing engineering experience.

• Exposure to private equity, M& A, consulting, or post-acquisition integrations.

• Experience with Snowflake, Databricks, Iceberg-based data platforms , or event-driven architectures.

• Experience building and operating production agentic systems, including evals, autonomy gating, monitoring, and outcome tracking.

The Opportunity

This role offers the chance to work at the forefront of AI-native software engineering , applying agentic systems to real operating businesses where the impact can be directly measured.

You’ll have significant ownership, work directly with senior business leaders, and help turn successful AI deployments into scalable solutions that can be repeated across an expanding portfolio.

If you’re an engineer who enjoys getting close to the business problem, shipping quickly, and seeing your software directly influence outcomes, VSG Recruitment would like to hear from you.