Forward Deployed Engineer

Sapira; United States; Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Join Sapira in the United States as a visionary engineer focusing on deploying PHARO, a cognitive engine that transforms enterprise operations. You will take ownership of deployments, collaborating with C-level executives and building new capabilities to meet complex operational challenges.

Ideal candidates have a strong software development track record in production AI environments and possess the insight to identify unbuilt solutions. This role will require you to navigate customer dynamics effectively and is essential for driving innovation in high-stakes industries.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in technical roles with a track record of shipping production software.
• Experience driving technology adoption inside large enterprises, especially in industrial environments.

Responsibilities

• Discover and build PHARO's next deployments while identifying unaddressed operational problems.
• Act as a technical partner to C-suite executives, explaining project outcomes and associated risks.
• Scale successful implementations for repeatability across customer base.

Skills

0-to-1 build track record

Production AI experience

Full-stack technical depth

Business acumen

Customer instinct

Builder's judgment

Curiosity and scrappiness

Experience

Education

Technical degree in CS, engineering, math, or related fields

Job description

At Sapira, we're building PHARO: the cognitive engine for heavy enterprise operations. While most AI tools are built to chat, draft emails, or summarize data, we build AI that actually executes. We deploy networks of specialized, multi-agent systems that plug directly into legacy systems, autonomously reading unstructured documents, navigating complex deterministic decision trees, and executing end-to-end workflows without human intervention. We turn slow, manual back-office bottlenecks into highly scalable digital assembly lines.

We don't build software for Silicon Valley; we build operational infrastructure for the physical economy. Our focus is strictly on high-stakes, high-volume environments like supply chain, heavy manufacturing, and logistics. And we are not just building for the future — we are operating at scale today. PHARO is already powering the back-office operations of €1B+ revenue industrial titans.

If you're excited to shape how the physical economy works, you'll help build systems deployed inside the operational nervous system of massive enterprises — deeply embedded where the real work gets done. You'll ship agentic capabilities on an extensible stack, with the craft and care required for enterprise trust, as we bring AI that actually executes to the industries that power the real world.

About the role

You'll join Sapira's forward deployed team and operate with the autonomy and accountability of a founder. Your job is to discover and build PHARO's next generation of deployments, working directly with the C-suite of some of the world's most complex industrial businesses and with Sapira's own engineering and product teams.

PHARO is a horizontal AI platform deployed against the deepest operational workflows in the physical economy — and that scope is what makes this role unique. You won't be configuring existing products or optimizing within defined constraints. You'll identify the biggest unsolved operational problems at our most strategic customers, build entirely new agent capabilities to solve them, and in doing so shape what PHARO becomes. The best of what you build can be generalized and shipped to every Sapira customer in the world. You get founder-level ownership with Sapira's resources, relationships, and scale behind you.

You will

• Discover and build PHARO's next deployments. Your primary job is 0-to-1 implementation. Nothing about what you're building is predefined — you'll identify where PHARO's platform can be extended to solve problems no product currently solves, then design and ship it.
• Lead deep opportunity discovery. Before you write a line of code, you go deep on the business. What's structurally broken? Where is the biggest concentration of unsolved value? What's actually buildable, and what's the fastest path to something real that can be tested and learned from? You'll form strong hypotheses and pressure-test them directly with the people who have to live with the outcome.
• Be a technical partner to the C-suite. You'll earn trust at the highest levels of your customer organizations — not just with technical teams, but with the executives who are accountable for outcomes. You can explain what you're building, why it will work, and what the risks are to anyone in the room.
• Scale what works. Once something works, you'll make it repeatable — working closely with the core R&D team to ensure the product is scalable.
• Stay at the frontier with Sapira's R&D team. You'll work closely with Sapira's core engineering and product teams, staying ahead of what's possible on the platform and actively shaping how its capabilities evolve. What you encounter in the field directly informs what gets built next.

About you

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 and resourceful, you move fast enough to learn, and you're as comfortable in a strategic discussion with a CEO as you are deep in a codebase. You've shipped actual products that real people use, that drove real outcomes — and you want to do it at a higher level of ambition.

• 0-to-1 build track record. You've built production software from scratch in ambiguous environments. You can point to something that didn't exist before you showed up and is now used by real people at scale.
• Production AI experience. You've shipped AI-powered solutions in the real world — prompt engineering, agent development, evaluation frameworks, deployment at scale. Not just prototypes.
• Full-stack technical depth. Strong programming skills across the stack with a deep understanding of and experience with how enterprise systems actually work.
• Business acumen. You can walk into a customer, identify where the real problems are, and connect that diagnosis to a product hypothesis — without being handed a brief.
• Customer instinct. You build trust quickly at every level of an organization, communicate with clarity, and know how to tailor your depth to the room.
• Builder's judgment. You know what's actually buildable, how long it will take, and when to simplify scope to get something real into production faster. You spot problems early and solve them independently.
• Curiosity and scrappiness. You're driven to understand problems deeply before solving them, and resourceful enough to find a path forward when none is obvious.
• Experience. 4+ years in technical roles with a track record of shipping production software.
• Willingness to travel. This role requires 25–50% travel, including on-site visits to industrial customers across the region.

Nice to have

• Experience at a top-tier technology company or in a forward deployed engineering role.
• A technical degree in CS, engineering, math, or a related field.
• Deep familiarity with LLMs, retrieval systems, agent frameworks, and evaluation methodologies.
• Experience driving technology adoption inside large enterprises — especially in industrial, supply chain, manufacturing, or logistics environments.

Our values

• Matter-of-fact. Why show you what's possible when we can show you what's working? We go and deliver, with real evidence. We don't pitch the future of AI — we point at the workflows it's already running.
• Cutting through the theater. Corporate life is full of "coordination theater" — meetings about meetings, tools about tools. Being sincere means calling out the theater. We don't just report on the landscape; we trade polite dashboards for honest friction.
• Ahead of the standard. This is how companies will operate. We're continuously searching the edge of what is possible, and we bring our clients with us.