Founding Customer Engineer

Pace; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Pace, the AI operations partner for insurers, is hiring a Founding Customer Engineer in New York. You will own customer success after deployment and shape how this function operates from the ground up.

This is not traditional support; you will work directly with customers to understand systems, investigate agent behavior, and resolve product and integration issues with speed and judgment. You will collaborate across customers, Product, and Engineering, diving into logs, data, configurations,

Qualifications

• Must have strong systems and debugging skills.
• Must hold a four-year degree.
• Experience in customer success, solutions engineering or customer engineering is preferred and agentic AI/insurance/financial services experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own customer outcomes for a portfolio of customers and drive resolutions.
• Investigate and debug agent behavior using logs, prompts, tools and data.
• Design solutions with customers considering security requirements and constraints.
• Partner with Product & Engineering to turn feedback into improvements.
• Build the Customer Engineering function with playbooks, tools, and escalation paths.

Skills

SQL

APIs

Logs

Data flows

Cloud architectures

Code reading

Customer presence

Debugging

Education

Four-year degree

Job description

Pace is the AI operations partner for leading insurers. We combine AI agents with expert review to automate complex insurance workflows. Financial services companies spend nearly $400bn a year on outsourcing; we're changing that by working alongside some of the world's largest institutions.

Role

We're looking for a Founding Customer Engineer to own customer success after deployment. As the first hire in this function, you'll shape how it operates and help build it from the ground up.

This is not a traditional support role. You'll work directly with customers to understand their systems, investigate agent behavior, and resolve product and integration issues with speed and judgment. You'll own outcomes end to end and step in wherever needed to keep customers successful.

You'll work across customers, Product, and Engineering. You won't ship core production code, but you'll go deep into logs, data, configurations, APIs, and agent behavior—and make scoped agent changes when that's the fastest path to a solution.

In practice, you will:

• Own customer outcomes: Serve as the primary point of contact for a portfolio of customers, set clear expectations, and drive questions and escalations through resolution.

• Investigate and debug agent behavior: Triage issues across prompts, tools, workflows, data, and integrations. Use logs and structured analysis to find root causes and fix issues directly when possible.

• Design solutions with customers: Understand customer systems, security requirements, and operating constraints; weigh architecture and integration tradeoffs; and turn messy requirements into practical solutions.

• Partner with Product & Engineering: Represent the customer by synthesizing feedback, diagnosing issues before escalation, driving each escalation to resolution, and turning recurring patterns into product improvements.

• Build the Customer Engineering function: Create the playbooks, tools, documentation, and escalation paths that make customer support faster and more repeatable.

You're a great fit if you:

• Operate with autonomy and urgency. You take ownership, make progress without close oversight, and stay calm when issues are ambiguous or time-sensitive.

• Are strong in systems and debugging. You can work with SQL, APIs, logs, data flows, and cloud architectures, read code when useful, and methodically debug unfamiliar systems.

• Have strong customer presence. You communicate clearly with operators, engineers, and executives, and customers trust you to lead through difficult issues.

• Turn ambiguity into action. You can move from messy workflows and incomplete information to a clear diagnosis, practical solution, and repeatable process—and know when to keep digging or bring in another team.

• Prefer hands-on problem solving. You want to learn the product deeply, deliver excellent work, and help build an early-stage function.

• Have experience in customer success, solutions engineering or customer engineering and hold a four-year degree. Experience with agentic AI, insurance or financial services, or building a function from zero is a plus.

Team characteristics

The Pace team shares two defining characteristics:

1. Integrity: We want to work with good people committed to doing the best work of their careers. We believe meaningful impact takes sustained focus, and we're building for the next 5-10 years.

2. Ambition: We're building more than a successful vertical AI company. We're pursuing a $100bn+ outcome across vertical services and want teammates whose ambitions match the opportunity—whether they aim to become exceptional individual contributors, lead at scale, or start companies of their own.

We're building a talent-dense team where people grow into world-class individual contributors, business owners, and leaders. We want Pace to accelerate your growth for the long term.

We're a <40 person team based in-person in New York and are lucky to be perfectly positioned with leading customers and top investors to make a real impact on one of the largest industries in the world.