Forward Deployed Engineer - US

Dryft; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship

Onsite relocation to SF

High ownership learning

Job summary

Dryft is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer in San Francisco to balance engineering work with customer interaction on-site at customer sites, with 10–30% travel and visa support. You will split time 50/50 between technical build and direct customer engagement on ERP integrations.

You will lead end-to-end rollouts, shape the product backbone from user feedback, and turn deployments into reusable features and playbooks, with potential growth into CPO/COO roles in a high-ownership environment.

Qualifications

• 2+ years in a top-tier role (e.g., consulting), as a founder, or as an early employee in a high-growth startup, with a technical degree or background
• Engineer-first mindset with ability to write production code and diagnose system-wide issues
• Industrial domain experience in manufacturing, industrial software, procurement, or supply chain is a plus
• Product-minded approach: listen to ERP chatter and translate into features
• High quality and detail orientation; professional communication under pressure

Responsibilities

• Lead full-stack rollouts end-to-end: scoping, onboarding, integration, training and aligning IT, engineers and executives
• Design the product backbone by working with users and prototyping features, writing production code when needed
• Turn deployments into reusable product features, data models and playbooks; grow into CPO/COO roles

Skills

Fast-paced experience

Engineer first

Industrial background

Product-minded

Quality-obsessed

Ultra-professional & detail-obsessed

Crisis communicator

Down-to-earth & relatable

Education

Technical degree or background

Job description

DRYFT

Ideas only change the world when you build them at scale. That’s what Dryft is here for.

Dryft builds models that automate complex human decisions in manufacturing operations. We capture the knowledge of experienced operators across supply chain, production planning, engineering and more, simulate the consequences of their decisions, and use this understanding to help run their business. Our customers include some of the largest robotics, machine and component manufacturers in the world.

We’re a small, talent-dense team with modest roots and a love for the physical world: cars, machines, planes. Our team includes graduates from Stanford, Berkeley, CDTM and TUM, winners of Stanford TreeHacks, recipients of Fulbright & Haniel scholarships, and people who have built everything from robots and race cars to software with millions of downloads.

What matters more to us than credentials is how people work: humility, hard work, speed, kindness, deep customer care, and a willingness to take on problems others avoid. Working at Dryft is hard. You get unusual ownership early on, with real responsibility. But that’s also what makes it one of the biggest learning experiences of your life.

We’re backed by founders and operators behind some of the most legendary tech companies of our time, Tier-1 U.S. venture firms, and board members of global industrial companies.

ERPs ran the physical world for half a century. Dryft is building the intelligence layer that will power the next.

THE ROLE

As our Forward Deployed Engineer, you split your time 50/50 between engineering and customer interaction. No role will teach you more about becoming a great founder, listener & builder. One day you're integrating a legacy ERP, the next you're on a flight to a shop floor in Mexico, and in between you ship the fix. You'll navigate stakeholders from IT to the C-level, all at once, and nothing really prepares you for it.

• Lead full-stack rollouts – own implementations end-to-end, from scoping and onboarding to integration and training, and align IT teams, engineers and C-level execs across Germany, the EU and the US

• Design the product backbone – work hands-on with users, translate their pain into product improvements, and prototype features yourself, ideally writing production code when needed

• Turn operations into product – every deployment becomes a blueprint for scale: you turn what you learned into reusable product features, data models and playbooks, and grow into roles like CPO or COO

This is a high-ownership, zero-handholding role, and only for someone who loves turning complexity into clarity and ships working solutions under pressure.

YOU

• Fast-paced experience – 2+ years in a top-tier role (e.g., consulting), as a founder, or as an early employee in a high-growth startup, with a technical degree or background

• Engineer first – you write production code, understand systems end-to-end, and when something breaks at a customer, you find the root cause

• Industrial background – experience in manufacturing, industrial software, procurement, supply chain or another industrial domain is a plus

• Product-minded – you listen to rants about ERP, nod wisely, and somehow turn them into product features that feel like magic

• Quality-obsessed – you hold yourself to a high bar, dive deep into problems, and care about getting it right, not just getting it done

• Ultra-professional & detail-obsessed – you earn trust with structure, polish, and docs so clean even a CTO stops asking questions

• Crisis communicator – when things get hard, people look to you; you calm an impatient exec, win over a skeptical IT leader, and still crack a joke in the middle of it

• Down-to-earth & relatable – you bond with shop-floor operators as easily as with boardroom execs, and you'll put on the safety shoes without being asked

• Relocation – you're ready to work onsite in San Francisco (we support visa), with 10 to 30% travel

TECH STACK

• FE (TypeScript): React, Chakra UI v3, TanStack Router, TanStack Query, Vite

• BE (Python): FastAPI with Pydantic v2, Temporal, Postgres with pgvector, dagster

• AI: Pydantic AI, Langfuse