Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Dayjob; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful equity

25 days holiday + your birthday off

Flexible working

Job summary

Dayjob is building AI agents for the US logistics market, and seeks a Forward Deployed Engineer to be the first technical hire on the ground in the US. You’ll work directly with the founders, sales, and customers to deploy and tune AI-powered planning in real operations.

You’ll own model settings, integrate ERP/telematics with Dayjob, and deliver on-site support while shaping the product with customer feedback and data-driven insights.

Qualifications

• 3+ years in a technical, customer-facing role (forward deployed / solutions / integration / implementation engineering or similar).
• Strong SQL - you can write your own queries against a non-trivial schema and read the results critically.
• Experience integrating systems, ideally including legacy or ERP-style platforms with imperfect data (APIs, file-based pipelines, data mapping).
• Comfort working with messy operational data and edge-case-heavy workflows.
• Clear communication with non-technical operators, and a willingness to travel to US customer sites.
• An ownership mindset - you diagnose root causes, follow through, and keep customers unblocked.

Responsibilities

• Own the optimisation model settings for our US customers - speed factors, service times, depot and tip times, zones, vehicle types, and time-window constraints - and validating them against real GPS and job-completion data.
• Supporting sales by setting up and tuning the model for demos, trials, and proofs of concept, so prospects see plans that reflect how their fleet really runs.
• Integrating customers’ legacy ERP, job-management systems and vehicle telematics with Dayjob, on-site - mapping data, designing the flows, and building the connections.
• Acting as first-line technical support for your customers: triaging issues, diagnosing whether the problem is data, settings, or platform, and escalating cleanly to engineering.
• Gathering customer requirements and translating them into clear input for product and engineering.
• Writing SQL and building reports (e.g. in Metabase) on fleet performance, utilisation, and plan quality.

Skills

SQL

Data integration

ERP / legacy systems

Customer-facing

Communication

Travel

Job description

Dayjob builds AI agents for Short Haul Trucking - a $45BN market that still runs on spreadsheets, phone calls, and software from the 1990s. We've just completed YC (P26), scaling fast toward $1M ARR, growing 20% MoM and launching in the US. Our first customers are some of the largest operators in UK and US waste and recycling. We are backed by leading investors including Paul Graham (Founder of YC) and Harry Stebbings (Founder of 20VC).

George (CEO) and Fred (CTO) founded Dayjob after meeting at Oxford - between them, they've launched and scaled products at Deliveroo and Otta, and have 15 years of AI-driven supply chain optimisation experience between them. They're joined by a team of engineers, operators, and customer success leads who've built and scaled products at Amazon, Sky, and beyond.

Every day, millions of operational decisions get made across industrial fleets: what work is booked, which vehicles fulfil it, and what happens when things go wrong. Most of that is still managed by hand. We're replacing it with AI agents that reason in real time - paired with an interface planners actually want to use.

Dayjob has developed its own proprietary models, which wouldn’t have been possible until now, delivering hundreds of thousands of pounds in additional revenue to its customers. This is a once in a generation opportunity to change how these businesses operate, industries where software adoption has been slow but where AI adoption can completely change their economics.

Dayjob is building the Claude code for the physical economy.

If you want to be the person who gets this technology live inside real operations - and on the ground as we launch in the US - this is the role.

Founding Team

Fred & George met at the University of Oxford.

• George (CEO) was Head of Sales at Otta and launched Deliveroo’s Grocery division, scaling it to £100M GMV.
• Fred (CTO) builds products that optimise complex supply chains using AI and advanced analytics.

The Role: Forward Deployed Engineer

This is a rare opportunity to be our first technical hire on the ground in the US, sitting at the front line of every customer deployment.

You’ll work directly with the founders, the sales team, and our customers to get fleets live on Dayjob: integrating their existing systems, tuning the optimization model so plans hold up against reality, and feeding what you learn back into the product.

This is not a back-office engineering role - you’ll be where the software meets the operation, owning the technical success of our US customers end-to-end.

What You’ll Work On

• Owning the optimisation model settings for our US customers - speed factors, service times, depot and tip times, zones, vehicle types, and time-window constraints - and validating them against real GPS and job-completion data.
• Supporting sales by setting up and tuning the model for demos, trials, and proofs of concept, so prospects see plans that reflect how their fleet really runs.
• Integrating customers’ legacy ERP, job-management systems and vehicle telematics with Dayjob, on-site - mapping data, designing the flows, and building the connections.
• Acting as first-line technical support for your customers: triaging issues, diagnosing whether the problem is data, settings, or platform, and escalating cleanly to engineering.
• Gathering customer requirements and translating them into clear input for product and engineering.
• Writing SQL and building reports (e.g. in Metabase) on fleet performance, utilisation, and plan quality.

Who You Are

We’re looking for a strong technical generalist who is happy being the person a customer relies on, in messy real-world environments.

You likely have:

• 3+ years in a technical, customer-facing role (forward deployed / solutions / integration / implementation engineering or similar).
• Strong SQL - you can write your own queries against a non-trivial schema and read the results critically.
• Experience integrating systems, ideally including legacy or ERP-style platforms with imperfect data (APIs, file-based pipelines, data mapping).
• Comfort working with messy operational data and edge-case-heavy workflows.
• Clear communication with non-technical operators, and a willingness to travel to US customer sites.
• An ownership mindset - you diagnose root causes, follow through, and keep customers unblocked.

Bonus If You’ve Worked On

• Contributing to a production codebase where it helps a deployment land.
• Internal tooling and back-office apps (e.g. Retool) - this role can grow into owning the customer-specific tooling we build.
• Logistics, fleet management, routing/VRP, or the waste and recycling sector.
• Optimisation- or scheduling-adjacent products, and a sense of what makes a plan good or bad.

What We Offer

• Meaningful equity
• 25 days holiday + your birthday off
• Flexible working, on the ground with US customers
• A foundational role shaping how Dayjob lands and scales in the US

Application Process

• Intro call with the team (30 mins)
• Technical interview (90 mins)
• Founder interview (30 mins)

Want to be the person who turns our software into live operations across the US? We’d love to hear from you.