Forward Deployed Engineer

TechTree; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity included

Job summary

TechTree is building an AI-native system of record for banking and transforming loan origination with an AI agent that guides applicants and accelerates processing times.

Forward Deployed Engineers embed with clients, understand workflows, and translate needs into features. You will work onsite with banks, own end-to-end workstreams, and shape platform architecture in a high-ownership, early-stage environment.

Qualifications

• A founder or builder mindset: you've started something or been an early engineer in a real enviroment.
• A track record of intensity: Olympiad/competitive background or shipped side projects with real users.
• The ability to go deep on a domain and come out knowing it better than expected.
• Genuine energy for customer-facing work: sitting with users and building in context.
• Outcome-driven: measure yourself by customer impact, not just output.
• Agency and crisp communication with non-engineers in a startup tempo.

Responsibilities

• Embed with bank customers on-site (~1 week/month, some 2-week co-locations) to understand workflows deeply and translate into product.
• Build and ship features directly — own workstreams end-to-end, not just tickets.
• Run discovery with users; at senior level, run the room and decide what's worth building.
• Shape the platform architecture and set the bar for how we build.
• Move fast and communicate crisply with non-engineers, measuring impact by customer outcomes.

Skills

Customer-facing

Ownership

Communication

Startup experience

Problem solving

Job description

We're building the AI-native system of record for banking - replacing 30+ year-old legacy infrastructure and automating up to 90% of the manual work that still runs the industry today.

Our first product is an AI-native loan origination system. Our built-in AI agent communicates with small business loan applicants via email and SMS, guides them through the application process, and prepares the loan file for a human underwriter - compressing a 90-day cycle down to 3 days.

We went through Y Combinator, had a fully regulated FDIC-insured bank running live production data within 8 weeks of launch, and are backed by Canapi Ventures - whose LPs include 70 of the top 100 US financial institutions. The founder of Live Oak Bank (the #1 SBA lender) and Ncino (the current market leader) sits on our board and has adopted our platform.

$10M+ contracted revenue. $29M+ raised. 40 people and growing fast.

The role

Forward Deployed Engineers are the connective tissue between our product and the banks that run on it. You embed with customers, understand their workflows at a level most engineers never reach, and build directly in response to what you find - shaping the platform in the process.

This is not a support role. You own outcomes: if a customer's loan cycle doesn't get faster, that's your problem to solve. You'll be in the room with bankers, in the codebase the same day, and on a plane when it matters.

We hire across two levels on this track - junior FDEs (0-3 years, or standout recent grads) and senior FDEs / Forward Deployment Tech Leads (3-5+ years, production SaaS) - through a single unified search. Level is calibrated in the loop.

What you'll do:

Embed with bank customers on-site (~1 week/month, some 2-week co-locations) to understand their workflows deeply and translate that into product

Build and ship features directly - own workstreams end-to-end, not just tickets

Run discovery with users; at senior level, run the room and decide what's worth building

Shape the platform architecture and set the bar for how we build

Move fast, communicate crisply with non-engineers, and measure yourself by whether the customer's job got better

What you bring

A founder or builder mindset - you've started something, been an early engineer somewhere real, or intend to found something; you resolve ambiguity by building

A track record of intensity - Olympiad/competitive background, strong internships, shipped side projects with real users, or equivalent signal

The ability to go deep on a domain and come out knowing it better than expected

Genuine energy for customer-facing work - sitting with users, not just building in isolation

Outcome-driven: you measure yourself by customer impact, not output

Agency, crisp communication with non-engineers, and startup tempo

Hard requirements:

Willingness to travel (~1 week/month on-site, occasional 2-week co-locations) - non-negotiable

Startup intensity - this is an early-stage, high-ownership environment

Logistics

Competitive compensation. Equity included.

We are not competing with Big Tech on comfort or brand - we're competing on impact and upside.

If you want to understand a hard problem better than anyone, build directly against it, and see your work shape an industry, this is the role.