Forward-Deployed Engineer

Alex; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Alex in San Francisco is seeking a highly capable Forward-Deployed Engineer to design and implement how customers use Alex. You’ll translate hiring-process conversations into live workflows, build integrations with ATSs, and own the onboarding, deployment, and production monitoring.

You should read and write code, diagnose issues with evidence, and communicate clearly with customers and product teams. Bonus if you’ve worked with enterprise APIs and observability tooling.

Qualifications

• This role reads code, writes code, and ships changes.
• Comfort working inside someone else’s system with incomplete documentation.
• Debugging instinct with evidence-based approach.
• Direct customer contact and clear communication.
• Strong writing for technical explanations.
• Nice to have forward-deployed, implementations, or integrations engineering experience with enterprise APIs.
• Experience building against messy enterprise APIs.
• Fluency with observability tooling (logs, traces, dashboards).

Responsibilities

• Design and build workflows that automate how a customer uses Alex.
• Own the integration surface with multiple ATS systems and APIs.
• Build new integrations, maintain existing ones, and integrate with related systems.
• Lead onboarding: connection, permissions, job import, field mapping, workflow build, testing, go-live.
• Own deployments in production and monitor for root causes.
• Act as the technical voice of the customer to drive product improvements.

Skills

Engineering ability

System integration

Debugging

Customer contact

Technical writing

Forward-deployed experience

Enterprise API experience

Observability tools

Tools

APIs

Job description

About Alex & the Role

Alex is an AI recruiter. Alex screens and interviews candidates over voice — on the web and over the phone — and it works inside the systems companies already recruit with: their applicant tracking system, their requisitions, their hiring process. Enterprises and staffing firms use it to run interviews at a volume they otherwise couldn't. Forward-Deployed Engineers are the technical owners of every Alex deployment. When a customer signs, FDEs are the people who make Alex work inside their systems and their process — and keep it working. It is the most end-to-end engineering role at the company: you design the solution, build it, integrate it, ship it to production, and own it afterwards.

What you’ll do

Design and build how a customer uses Alex. Turn a hiring process described in a meeting into workflows that actually run — triggers, filters, interview guides, and the actions we take back in their ATS. When a customer needs something their setup doesn't do yet, you drive it: design, build, test, roll out, verify.

Own the integration surface. We integrate with roughly two dozen applicant tracking systems, some directly and some through a unified API partner. You’ll build new integrations, maintain existing ones, and go deep on the ones you own — along with the other systems a customer’s workflow reaches into, like assessment providers and identity verification.

Run the technical side of onboarding. Connection, permissions and scopes, job import, field mapping, workflow build, test interviews, go-live — sequenced so nothing is discovered in front of a candidate.

Own the deployments in production. The team owns the support queue — for customers and candidates both — and diagnoses to root cause rather than working around it. You’ll also build the monitoring that catches problems before a customer has to call.

Be the technical voice of the customer. You are the person who sees, across many accounts, where the product runs out. Turning that into an evidenced case our product engineering team can act on is part of the job.

What we’re looking for

• Real engineering ability. This role reads code, writes code, and ships changes. It is not a technical-adjacent role.
• Comfort working inside someone else’s system with incomplete documentation. Much of this job is finding out what a third-party API actually does, as opposed to what its docs claim.
• Debugging instinct — the reflex to go get the evidence rather than reason from the symptom.
• Direct customer contact without a buffer. You’ll run your own working sessions and say hard things clearly.
• Strong writing. A large fraction of the output of this role is a clear written explanation.
• Nice to have Forward-deployed, implementation, solutions, or integrations engineering experience — especially anywhere with a long tail of third-party systems.
• You’ve built against a messy enterprise API and lived with the result.
• Fluency with observability tooling — logs, traces, dashboards, alerting you had to live with.