Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Linkup; California (MO); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Linkup is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join our early team and drive integrations of our AI-ready search APIs for leading AI companies and developers.

You will partner with founders, customers, and partners to design, prototype, and deploy real-world integrations, turning technical challenges into scalable solutions and shaping our product roadmap and marketing narratives.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in technical support engineering, software engineering, or solutions engineering with direct application development experience.
• Strong API integration skills — design and debug REST/JSON payloads, auth flows, and latency optimization.
• Understand web infrastructure, distributed systems, or retrieval pipelines.
• Comfortable debugging integrations and solving ambiguous technical challenges in customer environments.
• Communicate clearly and empathetically with both technical and business audiences.
• Curious about AI infrastructure, retrieval, and the emerging agentic ecosystem.
• Thrive in a fast-paced, high-ownership startup environment.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers and partners to design, prototype, and deploy integrations of Linkup’s APIs into real-world agentic systems.
• Participate in pre-sales efforts — technical discovery, proof-of-concept design, demo environments.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with backend, ML, and product teams to ensure performance and reliability at scale.
• Partner with the GTM Engineer and DevRel team to turn customer learnings into automation, tutorials, and playbooks.
• Identify and implement technical integrations with our other partners in the value chain (workflow orchestration, AI frameworks, etc.).
• Translate complex technical concepts into clear explanations for developers and business audiences.

Skills

API integration

REST/JSON

Distributed systems

Debugging integrations

Clear communication

Startup environment

AI infrastructure

Job description

About The Role

We’re looking for a top-tier Forward Deployed Engineer to join Linkup and work hand-in-hand with our founders, customers, and partners. This is our first hire at this role.

Your mission: help leading AI companies, developers, and enterprises integrate Linkup’s AI-ready search APIs into their products — and shape how the next generation of AI agents connects to the web.

This is a highly cross-functional role. You’ll operate at the intersection of engineering, GTM, and customer success, turning technical integrations into insights that drive our product roadmap, marketing narratives, and outbound strategy.

You’ll be the connective bridge between what customers build with Linkup and how we tell that story to the world.

What You’ll Do

• Work directly with customers and partners to design, prototype, and deploy integrations of Linkup’s APIs into real-world agentic systems.
• Participate in pre-sales efforts — technical discovery, proof-of-concept design, demo environments.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with backend, ML, and product teams to ensure performance and reliability at scale.
• Partner with the GTM Engineer and DevRel team to turn customer learnings into automation, tutorials, and playbooks.
• Identify and implement technical integrations with our other partners ****in the value chain (workflow orchestration, AI frameworks, etc.)
• Translate complex technical concepts into clear explanations for both developers and business audiences.

Why This Role Matters

Every integration you build helps define how AI systems connect to live, trusted information.

You’ll operate on the frontier between customers and product — bringing the voice of the field into everything we build and say.

Your Work Will Inform

• The stories we tell in marketing.
• The use cases we automate in our GTM systems.
• The features we prioritize in our roadmap.

If you love blending engineering with impact — building things users actually depend on — this role is for you.

You’re a Great Fit If You

• 4+ years in technical support engineering, software engineering, or solutions engineering, with direct application development experience.
• Strong API integration skills — able to design and debug REST/JSON payloads, manage auth flows, and optimize latency.
• Understand web infrastructure, distributed systems, or retrieval pipelines.
• Are comfortable debugging integrations and solving ambiguous technical challenges in customer environments.
• Communicate clearly and empathetically with both technical and business audiences.
• Are curious about AI infrastructure, retrieval, and the emerging agentic ecosystem.
• Thrive in a fast-paced, high-ownership startup environment.

Example Projects

• Help a partner integrate Linkup’s /search endpoint into their multi-agent workflow.
• Build a proof-of-concept combining a customer’s private data with Linkup’s real-time web results.
• Collaborate with the backend team to improve SDK telemetry and enterprise deployment reliability.
• Work with the GTM team to turn successful integrations into published use cases and reference architectures.
• Identify recurring customer needs that can become productized templates or automation.

About Linkup

Our Vision

We believe in a future of AI agents and the agentic web. These digital entities can create more value for humanity than we ever could alone, but they depend on the internet to operate, collaborate, take action, and gather information.

AI agents need web search

To perform well, they require information that is current, reliable, and context‑specific—not the diffuse, steadily aging knowledge frozen at their last training cut‑off.

Modern web search is built for humans, not AIs

Instead of trusted facts, it serves links, ads, and click‑bait. People want visually engaging pages; AI systems need structured truth. An AI can absorb oceans of data, while human attention barely skims the surface. Humans think visually and intuitively; AI reasons in latent space.

Web 2.0 is sunsetting

The deck is being reshuffled, and the Bing‑Google search oligopoly is crumbling. Indexing ever more pages is no longer the goal; semantically organizing facts for AI systems is. In the coming agentic web, Google’s ad‑driven model has no natural home.

Search for AI must be rebuilt from the ground up

We are reconstructing the web as a rigorously structured knowledge layer, mapping every concept, entity, and claim into a coherent semantic graph. This foundation delivers verified facts and rich context to AI instantly, unlocking faster reasoning, higher accuracy, and radically more useful answers for everyone.

Humans search Google; AI searches Linkup.

Our Mission

Reality never stands still, and neither should intelligence. Linkup reconnects language models to a living stream of verified facts, ensuring AIs remain as current and insightful as the world they serve.

Our mission is to deliver the world’s freshest, most trusted knowledge to AIs.

Our Culture

Our Culture Is Built On The Following Values

• Mission. We believe we play a critical role in building the agentic web. We are 100% committed to our mission of bringing the reality of the world to AI agents.
• Speed. We build fast, we build to last. We get things done, well.
• Ownership. We empower every team member to take ownership of their projects, ensuring they see them through to successful completion.
• Teamwork. Our strength lies in our unity. We rely on one another and embrace our diversity as a core asset.
• Humility. We maintain low egos, showing respect for others and continuously learning from their insights and experiences.

We expect all team member to take an active role in shaping our company culture.

Our Team

We are small technical team, working shoulder to shoulder to build the web of agents.

A Bit More About Our 3 Co-founders

• Philippe Mizrahi- Led the development of Lyft’s Autonomous Vehicles marketplace. Previously launched Amundsen, an open source search engine.
• Denis Charrier- Founding Engineer at Niland, an audio search company (acquired by Spotify), then Staff Engineer at Spotify. 15y of software development experience.
• Boris Toledano- Led robotics at Carrefour, after 3y at McKinsey & Co working on public affairs and digital transformation.