Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Denari; Madison (WI); Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Life insurance

Disability insurance

Job summary

Denari in Madison is hiring its first Forward Deployed Engineer to translate partner problems into working Denari solutions. You’ll collaborate with accounting firms to understand their operations, identify high-value problems, and rapidly build, configure, and deploy practical deployments on the Denari platform in a hybrid work setting.

This role emphasizes action over theoretical work: you’ll own engagements from scope to deployment, measure outcomes, and turn lessons into reusable

Qualifications

• Exceptional communication skills and ability to build trust with partners.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with partners to understand operations and opportunities.
• Design, build, configure, deploy, and maintain solutions within the Denari platform.
• Develop and customize agent skills and workflows in Denari Answers.
• Configure document schemas, user workflows, and automations.
• Use agentic coding tools to build integrations and prototypes.
• Define success measures before deployment and demonstrate value afterward.

Skills

Partner engagement

Technical problem solving

AI tools

Software prototyping

Customer-facing

Tools

Denari Answers

Claude Code

Agentic tools

Job description

Accounting runs on software built in the ’90s. We’re building what comes next — real product on hard problems, a small team, and a big industry. Come build with us.

You’ll build and ship on hard problems from day one — not sit in meetings about a backlog. Small team, fast pace, real ownership.

A big, overlooked industry

Accounting runs on software built in the '90s. The opportunity to modernize it is enormous, and we’re building what comes next.

Grounded in a real firm

We build alongside Lucida, our own accounting practice, so everything we ship is tested against how firms actually work.

How we work

We’re a small team building serious software for an industry that has waited a long time for it. A few things we care about:

Bias to shipping

We'd rather put a real thing in front of real firms and learn from it than debate it for a quarter. Work reaches customers in days, and the feedback loop is short enough that you feel the impact of what you built.

Own the whole problem

You’ll scope, build, and follow features through end to end — from the accounting workflow behind them to the last edge case in production. Small team, wide surface area, and real ownership from day one.

Learn the domain

Accounting runs deep, and we take it seriously. You’ll work close to Lucida, our own CPA firm, and learn how partners, preparers, and reviewers actually operate so everything we build holds up on real engagements.

How hiring works

A short, respectful process designed to show you real work and give you a clear answer quickly.

01

A 30-minute conversation with the team about your background, what you're looking for, and what we're building. No trick questions.

02

Working session

We work through a realistic problem together, close to what you'd actually do here. We care how you think, not whether you memorized an algorithm.

03

Meet the team

Spend time with the people you'd work with every day and dig into the product, the firm, and the industry we're setting out to modernize.

04

Offer

We move quickly. If it's a fit on both sides, you'll get a clear offer and a straightforward path to your first day.

Open positions

Location

Chicago, IL

Employment Type

Full time

Department

What We’re Building

Denari is building the modern software stack for accounting firms: an AI-powered platform that unifies client collaboration, document management, workflow automation, and financial insights in one place.

We’re a small, well-funded team with a built-in proving ground. Our sister company, Lucida Tax + Accounting, uses what we build every day, so we hear how a solution landed within hours of deploying it.

The Role

We’re hiring Denari’s first Forward Deployed Engineer to turn real partner problems into working solutions.

You’ll work directly with accounting firms to understand how they operate, identify their highest-value problems, and rapidly build, configure, and deploy solutions using the Denari platform. That could mean creating an agent skill in Denari Answers, configuring a document schema, designing a workflow, contributing a targeted improvement to the core product, or building a lightweight application alongside it.

This is not a traditional software engineering role, and formal software engineering experience is not required. We’re looking for a technically confident, resourceful builder who can use agentic development tools to solve real business problems. You should be able to think like an engineer—breaking down ambiguity, understanding systems, testing your work, and owning outcomes—without necessarily having followed a conventional engineering career path.

The objective isn’t simply to deliver what someone requests. It’s to understand what they actually need, determine the most pragmatic way to solve it, get the solution into their hands, and demonstrate that it created value.

As our founding FDE, you’ll also help define the function itself: how we scope engagements, prioritize opportunities, measure outcomes, monitor deployments, turn one-off work into reusable capabilities, and carry what we learn back into the product.

You’ll report directly to Denari’s CEO.

Your Impact Here Is Only Limited by Your Initiative

We are genuinely open to change. If you have an idea and you’re willing to put in the effort, we will back you—whether that’s a new partner solution, a reusable skill, a better deployment process, or a new way for the entire company to serve customers.

AI has also changed what counts as “hard.” Things that once required a traditional software development team can increasingly be built by resourceful people who understand the problem and know how to direct modern agentic tools.

You’ll have significant freedom in how you approach the work. With that freedom comes ownership: identifying what matters, making sound tradeoffs, communicating clearly, and following through after something ships.

The Tools You’ll Use

Denari Answers: Our agentic development platform for building and deploying skills, workflows, and partner-specific solutions.

Agentic coding tools: Tools such as Claude Code that help you rapidly build applications, integrations, automations, and prototypes—even if you are not a formally trained software engineer.

We care much more about what you can figure out and deliver with these tools than whether you can write every line of code yourself.

How We Work Together

This is a hybrid role based in Madison. You’ll spend three days a week in the office with the team, and the rest of the week you’ll work from wherever you do your best thinking.

Because this is a partner-facing role, you’ll also spend meaningful time in calls with accounting firms and frequently working alongside them directly. You should enjoy building relationships as much as building solutions.

What You’ll Do

Work directly with partners to understand their operations, uncover problems, and identify opportunities where Denari can create measurable value.

Design, build, configure, deploy, and maintain solutions within the Denari platform.

Develop and customize agent skills and workflows in Denari Answers.

Configure document schemas, user workflows, and automations across the Denari platform.

Use agentic coding tools to build integrations, internal automations, prototypes, and lightweight sidecar applications when the platform alone isn’t the right answer.

Make targeted contributions to Denari’s core product when a small change can unlock meaningful partner value, with support from our engineering team where needed.

Define success measures before deployment and demonstrate the operational or financial value created afterward.

Monitor deployed solutions, respond when something breaks, and improve their reliability over time.

Turn repeated partner needs into reusable skills, patterns, tooling, and product recommendations.

Communicate partner feedback and field observations clearly to product, engineering, and company leadership.

Help other Denari teams move faster, including developing automations and tools for our partnerships team.

Establish the playbooks, standards, and operating rhythms that future Forward Deployed Engineers will inherit.

We Love It When

You listen closely enough to uncover the real problem behind the initial request.

You take ownership from the first conversation through deployment, measurement, and ongoing support.

You choose the simplest approach that creates meaningful value.

You can build something scrappy today while recognizing what would need to change for it to scale tomorrow.

You try a new tool or approach on a Friday and demo it on Monday.

You communicate early and directly when priorities, constraints, or expectations need to change.

You treat service as part of the product and make partners feel that their problems matter.

You disagree with us and say so because you care about getting it right.

You move confidently across unfamiliar systems without needing to be an expert in all of them first.

Our Culture

We care that our co-workers care, even when we disagree. We’d rather hash out a real disagreement than watch someone quietly check out.

We’re not AI-pilled, but we think AI is clearly a complete game‑changer. We’re just another crew trying to figure it out, which means we stay open and experiment constantly.

Assertiveness and accountability. Speak up, commit, follow through, and own the outcome either way.

Collaboration and flexibility. Small team, multiple products, lots of context-switching. We support each other through it.

Supportive by default. When someone’s stuck, struggling, or stretching into something new, the team shows up.

Service matters. We want our partners to feel that we understand their work, care about their success, and can be trusted to follow through.

What We’re Looking For

Exceptional communication skills and the ability to build trust with partners.

The curiosity and judgment to turn ambiguous business problems into concrete technical solutions.

Strong ownership, self‑direction, and comfort operating without a predefined playbook.

A pragmatic mindset: you know when to configure, when to automate, when to build, and when the problem doesn’t require software at all.

Confidence working across a broad range of systems, tools, and problem types.

Substantial experience using AI agents in your day‑to‑day work.

Experience using agentic development tools such as Claude Code to build useful applications, automations, or internal tools.

The ability to measure outcomes and explain the value of what you delivered.

Comfort working directly with customers and maintaining a high standard of responsiveness and professionalism.

Clear, honest, upfront communication.

Formal software engineering education or professional software engineering experience is not required. You may come from solutions engineering, implementation, technical consulting, operations, product, accounting technology, or another hands‑on customer‑facing role. We care about your ability to understand problems, work effectively with technical systems, use modern agentic tools, and deliver reliable outcomes.

You might be especially well suited to this role if you have worked as a Technical Solutions Engineer in a complex software environment and have since become highly effective at building with AI development tools.

This Role May Not Be for You If

You want requirements to be fully defined before you begin.

You prefer to specialize deeply in one area rather than move between partners, workflows, agents, integrations, and product problems.

You see customer conversations or ongoing support as distractions from the “real” work.

You optimize for technical elegance even when a simpler solution would create value sooner.

You enjoy prototyping but lose interest in deployment, measurement, documentation, or maintenance.

Health, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance