Forward Deployed Engineer

SageOx; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

SageOx in Seattle is seeking its first Forward Deployed Engineer to be the builder at the customer boundary. You will embed where customers live, translate feedback into product value, and ship fixes and features end-to-end, turning customer pain into tangible improvements.

The role requires frequent onsite work in Seattle, with occasional Bay Area travel through 2026. We don’t run traditional interviews—a 3–5 day work trial in Seattle will show how you collaborate and deliver in real scenarios.

Qualifications

• Profile: an engineer who chooses people; a builder with technical chops who enjoys customer-facing work.
• Experience: software engineer who migrated toward customers or solutions engineer at a dev-tool/infra startup.
• Technical bar: debug an integration end-to-end and ship small features independently.
• Cultural fit: energized by customer pings and onsite visits; strong writing for digests and onboarding materials.
• AI-native: comfortable with agent workflows and AI tooling.
• Logistics: onsite onboarding implies travel; travel occasionally.

Responsibilities

• Be the first line of engagement with customers; triage issues, reproduce, and sometimes fix directly.
• Onboard new customers onsite: run in-person setup and design workflow with their team.
• Own customer-reported items end-to-end from bug to merged PR.
• Create value through solutions, docs, and teaching; scale onboarding.
• Own the signal loop: daily/weekly digest of issues, trends, quotes for the team.
• Shorten time-to-value: ensure onboarding/issues yield fixes or product tweaks.

Job description

SageOx is a well-funded, early-stage startup building the hivemind for human-AI teams: shared memory and collaboration tools that keep people and AI coworkers genuinely aligned and productive as one team. We're hiring our first Forward Deployed Engineer to be our builder at the customer boundary.

The Job

Be SageOx's builder at the customer boundary — the first line of partnership for every team we serve. Embedded where customers live (their Slack, their office), this engineer turns friction into shipped product: educating teams, unlocking value, and building the fixes and features that customer experience demands. Customers reach daily-active use because this person exists — and the roadmap stays directly aligned to customer needs because of the feedback they synthesize.

What You'll Actually Do

• First line of engagement: Live where customers live; catch issues as they arrive; triage everything; fix some directly and elevate only what genuinely needs deeper core-engineering context — with a clean repro and context. Today the engagement surface is shared Slack channels — right for now, while we're under ~30 teams and know every one by name — but over time it may shift. This person helps identify the best way to stay engaged and meets customers where they are.

• Onboard new customers onsite: Run onboarding in person at the customer's office — setup, workflow design with their team, first-value moments witnessed and secured.

• Build on the core product. This is not a support role with a code editor nearby — this person IS a builder. They own customer-reported items end-to-end: bug to merged PR, small feature to shipped. The customer-reported queue is their backlog into the core codebase, and their commits are how customer pain becomes product, fast.

• Create value, not just fixes: Design solutions and workflows with customer teams, educate users into power users, and turn recurring questions into reusable teaching — docs, how-tos, office hours. The job is measured in value unlocked, not tickets closed.

• Own the signal loop: A daily and weekly customer digest for the whole team — issues, trends, feature friction, use-case patterns, verbatim quotes. This is how the team stays connected to customer truth without carrying the response traffic; it's a first-class deliverable, not a side note.

• Shorten time-to-value every week: Each onboarding and each recurring issue should produce a fix, a doc, or a product suggestion that makes the next customer faster.

Who We're Looking For

• Profile in one line: An engineer who chooses people — a builder with real technical chops who discovered they're happiest at the customer boundary: sharing, educating, helping, unlocking value.

• Experience: Software engineer who migrated toward customers, or a solutions/support/sales engineer at a dev-tool or infra startup who ships fixes themselves. Early-startup exposure strongly preferred over big-co support orgs.

• Technical bar: Debug an integration end-to-end and ship small features — not only bug fixes — unsupervised. Fast, pragmatic; moves independently but knows when to flag, ask for help, or request review.

• Cultural fit: Energized (not drained) by customer pings and onsite visits; patient teacher; writes clearly — the digest and the onboarding materials are writing deliverables, and good ones compound: every improvement lets more teams self-onboard or self-unblock, easing this person's own load over time; embraces transparency; focused on making the team win.

• AI-native: Comfortable with agent workflows and AI tooling; they'll be teaching customers to work with AI coworkers, so they must work that way themselves.

• Logistics: Onsite onboarding makes travel a real constraint — genuinely travel-willing.

Location — Seattle, In Person

Same as every role here. In person, five days a week, in Seattle. FDE travel to customer sites happens occasionally — think a few days a quarter, not permanent road-warrior life.

One narrow exception: Bay Area-based candidates we can get to Seattle at least two weeks a month, through end of 2026.

How We Hire

No traditional interviews. We'll clear an initial assessment and invite you to a work trial: 3–5 days in Seattle, working on something real alongside the team, the way the team actually works. Most of what matters shows up there faster than any interview loop could reveal.

Ajit wrote up why we hire this way: Read the post

SageOx Today

$15M seed led by Canaan, with A.Capital, Pioneer Square Labs, and Founders' Co-op. Founded by Ajit Banerjee (AWS EC2/EBS, XetHub Hugging Face), Ryan Snodgrass (early Amazon, Kindle/AWS-scale cloud systems), and Milkana Brace (EVP Product at Remitly). Small on purpose. More about the team

Compensation

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. We'll talk specifics once we know it's a real mutual fit.