Forward-Deployed Engineer

alexai; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Alex is looking for a Forward-Deployed Engineer who will design and build how customers use the Alex platform, turning hiring processes into live workflows and integrations with ATS systems.

You will own onboarding, production deployments, and monitoring, while serving as the technical voice of the customer to guide product improvements.

Qualifications

• Real engineering ability: reads code, writes code, ships changes.
• Comfort with integrating into others' systems and limited docs.
• Strong debugging instinct: gather evidence over symptoms.
• Direct customer interaction without a buffer.
• Clear written explanations in deliverables.

Responsibilities

• Design and build how a customer uses Alex and turns a hiring process into executable workflows.
• Own integration surface with ATS and related systems; add or refine integrations.
• Handle onboarding technicals: connection setup, permissions, mapping, go-live.
• Own deployments in production and build monitoring to catch issues early.
• Act as the technical voice of the customer to inform product needs.

Skills

Engineering ability

Code reading/writing

Debugging instinct

Customer communication

Clear writing

Tools

Observability tooling

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.

Alex is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.