Forward deployed engineer

BuildVision; Washington (District of Columbia, MD); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Unlimited PTO

100% health coverage

Job summary

BuildVision is hiring a forward-deployed engineer (FDE) who will sit at the intersection of engineering, sales, and customers. You will build real features on top of our platform and drive platform-wide improvements when needs scale beyond a single account.

You’ll attend every customer meeting for your pod and help shape the product with direct customer feedback. In Tysons Corner, you’ll spend time on-site at customers and in our office, collaborating with a deployment strategist.

Qualifications

• Strong engineer first, able to ship features on top of an existing platform.
• Judgment to differentiate customer-specific work vs platform-wide work.
• Experience working directly with customers (FDE, solutions/implementation engineer, or startup engineer).
• Hands-on with LLMs: prompts, outputs, and fixes via data or code.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical side of customer meetings and translate needs into platform work.
• Build features on top of the core platform and push reusable improvements.
• Review customer contracts and ensure commitments can be delivered.
• Collaborate with sales, GTM, core engineering, and product.

Skills

TypeScript

Node.js

PostgreSQL

React

SQL

Data wrangling

Customer engagement

Tools

Git

LLMs/Prompting

Job description

We are hiring a forward-deployed engineer (FDE). They'd be the engineer in a two-person deployment pod that gets HVAC manufacturers and reps live on BuildVision and seeing value fast. Their partner is a deployment strategist who spends about 70% of their time with customers and 30% on code. The FDE is the reverse: about 70% code and 30% customer work. They'd sit in every customer meeting for their pod's accounts and work closely with our sales and GTM team. They're embedded in engineering and join our daily standups. They build what each customer needs on top of our core platform, and they drive changes into the platform itself when a need goes beyond one customer. Success looks like customers live in weeks, not quarters, and most of what they build eventually becoming part of the platform for everyone.

They'd have production access and very few gates. The hard ones are changes that can't be undone, changes that affect every customer, and changes to how we store data. Core extraction stays with core engineering. Everything else, they're trusted to ship. They also review customer contracts before they're signed, so we don't commit to work we can't deliver.

Skill set

• A strong engineer first, comfortable building real features on top of an existing platform. We use TypeScript, Node, Postgres, and React; they don't need all four.
• Good judgment about where work belongs. They can tell when a request is specific to one customer and can be built on top of the platform, and when it's a gap every customer will hit and belongs in the core platform. They then work with core engineering and product to land it.
• Has worked directly with customers, as an FDE, solutions engineer, or implementation engineer, or as a startup engineer who talked to users.
• Hands-on with LLMs: writing and iterating on prompts, judging output quality, and knowing when the fix is in the prompt, the data, or the code.
• Strong at data wrangling: messy files, imports, mapping one customer's data into our model, and SQL to check the results. CRM integrations like Salesforce are a plus; it's likely their first project.
• Startup experience preferred. Construction, HVAC, or manufacturing exposure is a bonus, not a requirement. Their strategist partner brings the industry depth.

Style

• Comfortable leading the technical side of a customer meeting. They can explain an issue in plain language to a sales rep or a VP.
• Can point to something they shipped for a customer without being told to.
• Bias to action: unblocks the customer today without creating one-off work the platform will pay for later.
• A true partner to the strategist, sharing ownership of each customer's outcome.
• In our Tysons Corner office Monday through Wednesday, with regular time on-site at customers. Customer visits can take the place of office days.

Elevator pitch

• At BuildVision, we work with HVAC manufacturers and reps to help them sell more equipment. A rep firm gets dozens of bid invites a week, each with hundreds of pages of specs and drawings, and only has time to quote a fraction of them. We use AI to turn those documents and emails into structured data they can act on. We're backed by Norwest, Crosslink, and Euclid, and our team has been building construction procurement software for over a decade, at BuildingConnected, Autodesk Construction Cloud, and Turner's SourceBlue, which buys roughly $1B a year in MEP equipment. As an FDE, you'd be the engineer in the room for every customer conversation. You'd build what customers need on top of our platform and decide what should become part of the platform for everyone. The role comes with equity, unlimited PTO, 100% health coverage, and more.