Forward Deployed Engineer

Collate; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Collate is seeking a forward-deployed engineer to lead deployments of AI systems within life sciences organizations in San Francisco. This role involves engaging deeply with customers, designing and shipping AI solutions, and communicating technical tradeoffs at various levels. The ideal candidate has a strong background in AI deployments, has built production software from scratch, and possesses excellent problem-solving and communication skills. The base salary ranges from $150,000 to $300,000, depending on experience.

Qualifications

• Experience in customer-facing AI deployments from scoping to production adoption.
• Track record of 0-to-1 product builds in ambiguous environments.
• Hands-on production AI experience in prompt engineering and agent development.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end deployments of AI systems in life sciences organizations.
• Collaborate closely with customer teams to identify structural problems.
• Design and launch production AI systems that integrate with existing infrastructures.

Skills

AI deployments

Production software development

Prompt engineering

Technical decision-making

Communication skills

Problem-solving

Tools

Go

Postgres

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Argo CD

Job description

About Collate

Collate is an AI document generation platform for life sciences. We automate paperwork with AI, helping our customers get life‑saving innovations to patients years faster. Collate is an end‑to‑end solution, powering every step of drug, diagnostic, and medical device development—from concept to market.

Our CEO Surbhi Sarna is a former General Partner at Y Combinator. Surbhi founded nVision Medical, which developed a new method to detect ovarian cancer and was acquired by Boston Scientific. Our CTO Nate Smith is a former Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and founder of Lever. Our AI researchers, engineers, and designers have worked at Google, Nvidia, Meta, Netflix, Amazon, AirBnB, Hippocratic AI, and Grail, and 40% of our team are former founders.

We’re a small, elite team, with over $30M in seed funding from top investors (Redpoint, First Round Capital, Conviction, and Y Combinator) and leaders in healthcare and AI. This is a rare chance to join at the ground floor of a company with world‑changing potential, experienced founders, and resources to execute at scale.

About the Role

Collate’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with Fortune 100 life sciences organizations to deploy production AI systems across their most critical document and regulatory workflows. We operate at the boundary of customer deployment and core platform development — using early engagements to define repeatable solution patterns, evaluation standards, and agentic architectures that scale across the industry.

You’ll join as one of the first members of this team and operate with the autonomy of a founder. Your job is to go deep on the hardest problems at our most strategic customers — medical writers, regulatory affairs teams, clinical operations, and development engineers — identify what’s structurally broken, and build production AI systems that solve it. What you build shapes the Collate platform for every customer that comes after you.

Modern Tech Stack

Collate uses a modern tech stack, targeting a highly reliable and available platform. We use Go for scalable backend services, Postgres as our main database, TypeScript & React for frontend development, and Python for AI & ML services.

Our infrastructure is hosted on AWS with Kubernetes for orchestration and Terraform + Argo CD for configuration management. Other key systems include S3, Kafka, OpenSearch, LLMs, and other AI models.

What You’ll Do

• Lead end‑to‑end deployments of Collate’s AI systems inside life sciences organizations — owning scoping, build, and production rollout from first conversation to measurable workflow impact.
• Go deep before you write a line of code. Embed with customer teams — medical writers, regulatory affairs, clinical ops — to understand what’s structurally broken, where the highest concentration of unsolved value lives, and what’s actually buildable.
• Design and ship production AI systems — document generation agents, agentic workflows, data pipelines — that integrate with customers’ existing infrastructure and regulatory environments.
• Define and run eval loops that measure system quality against workflow‑specific benchmarks — acceptance criteria, output accuracy, reviewer expectations — and use that signal to improve deployed systems over time.
• Turn early wins into repeatable patterns. The best of what you build ships to every Collate customer. What you discover in the field directly shapes what gets built next — you’re a core feedback loop between customers and the product team.
• Communicate across every altitude. Translate technical tradeoffs into decisions and operating procedures for scientific, regulatory, and executive audiences — and bring that clarity back to Collate’s engineering and product teams.

What We’re Looking For

• You’ve owned customer‑facing AI deployments end‑to‑end — from scoping through production adoption — and can point to shipped systems that drove measurable workflow impact.
• You have a 0‑to‑1 build track record. You’ve built production software from scratch in ambiguous environments and moved fast enough to learn — not just prototype.
• You have hands‑on production AI experience: prompt engineering, agent development, evaluation frameworks, and deployment at scale — not just familiarity with the landscape.
• You’ve operated as a senior engineer or tech lead trusted to make technical decisions in ambiguous environments — without needing a defined spec or a clear path.
• You communicate clearly across every altitude — as comfortable in a strategic discussion with a CTO as you are deep in a codebase, and able to translate tradeoffs into decisions for non‑technical stakeholders.
• Bonus: you have context in life sciences, regulated industries, or document‑heavy workflows — and understand what it means to build for auditability, compliance, and high‑stakes review cycles.
• You think like a founder. When you walk into a customer, you’re curious about the business, digging into what’s broken, and figuring out what to build that doesn’t yet exist. You’re scrappy, resourceful, and want to do it at a higher level of ambition.

Why Join Collate?

Impact: Build systems and experiences that touch real patients and providers, improving healthcare outcomes.

Ownership: Shape both our product experience and our engineering culture from the start.

Learning: Collaborate with a uniquely interdisciplinary team—AI researchers, healthcare leaders, and experienced startup builders.

Upside: Join a company early enough to have meaningful equity and career‑defining impact.

The base salary range for this role is $150,000–$300,000 USD annually, depending on experience and level (Tier 1, San Francisco).