Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Gleanwork; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Home office improvement stipend

Annual education and wellness stipends

Healthy daily lunches

Job summary

Gleanwork in New York is seeking a founding member for their forward-deployed team to lead product innovation from the ground up. You will collaborate directly with influential customers and Glean's engineering teams, identifying high-impact business problems and crafting unique solutions.

Ideal candidates will have a strong foundation in building production software and experience with AI solutions, as well as a proven track record of delivering real-world products.

This is a hybrid role requiring 25-50% travel, offering a salary range of $160,000 to $270,000 annually, plus comprehensive benefits.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in technical roles with a track record of shipping production software.
• Experience as a founder or in a forward-deployed engineering role is preferred.
• Willingness to travel 25-50%.

Responsibilities

• Discover and build Glean's next product surfaces from scratch.
• Lead deep opportunity discovery to identify the biggest unsolved business problems.
• Act as a technical partner to the C-suite and earn trust at high levels of customer organizations.
• Scale successful products and work with Glean's R&D team to inform future developments.

Skills

Founder-like thinking

Production software experience

AI-powered solutions

Full-stack technical depth

Business acumen

Customer instinct

Builder's judgment

Curiosity and scrappiness

Education

Technical degree in CS or related field

Job description

Glean is the Work AI platform that helps everyone work smarter with AI. What began as the industry’s most advanced enterprise search has evolved into a full‑scale Work AI ecosystem, powering intelligent Search, an AI Assistant, and scalable AI agents on one secure, open platform. With over 100 enterprise SaaS connectors, flexible LLM choice, and robust APIs, Glean gives organizations the infrastructure to govern, scale, and customize AI across their entire business without vendor lock‑in or costly implementation cycles.

At its core, Glean is redefining how enterprises find, use, and act on knowledge. Its Enterprise Graph and Personal Knowledge Graph map the relationships between people, content, and activity, delivering deeply personalized, context‑aware responses for every employee. This foundation powers Glean’s agentic capabilities—AI agents that automate real work across teams by accessing the industry’s broadest range of data: enterprise and world, structured and unstructured, historical and real‑time. The result is measurable business impact through faster onboarding, hours of productivity gained each week, and smarter, safer decisions at every level.

Recognized by Fast Company as one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies (Top 10, 2025), by CNBC’s Disruptor 50, Bloomberg’s AI Startups to Watch (2026), Forbes AI 50, and Gartner’s Tech Innovators in Agentic AI, Glean continues to accelerate its global impact. With customers across 50+ industries and 1,000+ employees in more than 25 countries, Glean is helping the world’s largest organizations make every employee AI‑fluent and turning the super‑intelligent enterprise from concept into reality.

About the Role

You’ll join as a founding member of Glean’s forward‑deployed team and operate with the autonomy and accountability of a founder. Your job is to discover and build Glean’s next generation of product surfaces, working in a pod with Forward Deployed PMs and directly with the C‑suite of the world’s most influential companies, as well as with Glean’s engineering and product teams.

Glean is a fully horizontal AI platform—and that scope is what makes this role unique. You won’t be configuring existing products or optimizing within defined constraints. You’ll identify the biggest unsolved business problems at our most strategic customers, build entirely new products to solve them, and in doing so shape what Glean becomes. The best of what you build ships to every Glean customer in the world. You get founder‑level ownership with Glean’s resources, relationships, and scale behind you.

You will

• Discover and build Glean’s next product surfaces: Your primary job is 0‑to‑1 product creation. Nothing about what you’re building is predefined—you’ll work with your FDPM to identify where Glean’s platform can be extended to solve problems no product currently solves, then design and ship it. What you build becomes what Glean ships.
• Lead deep opportunity discovery: Before you write a line of code, you go deep on the business. What’s structurally broken? Where is the biggest concentration of unsolved value? What’s actually buildable, and what’s the fastest path to something real that can be tested and learned from? You’ll form strong hypotheses alongside your FDPM and pressure‑test them directly with the people who have to live with the outcome.
• Be a technical partner to the C‑suite: You’ll earn trust at the highest levels of your customer organizations—not just with technical teams, but with the executives who are accountable for outcomes. You can explain what you’re building, why it will work, and what the risks are to anyone in the room.
• Scale what works: Once something works, you’ll make it repeatable—working closely with the core R&D team to ensure the product is scalable.
• Stay at the frontier with Glean’s R&D team: You’ll work closely with Glean’s core engineering and product teams, staying ahead of what’s possible on the platform and actively shaping how its capabilities evolve. What you encounter in the field directly informs what gets built next.

About you

• You think like a founder. When you walk into a customer, you’re curious about the business, digging into what’s broken, and figuring out what to build that doesn’t yet exist. You’re scrappy and resourceful, move fast enough to learn, and you’re as comfortable in a strategic discussion with a CEO as you are deep in a codebase. You’ve shipped actual products that real people use, that drove real outcomes—and you want to do it at a higher level of ambition.
• 0‑to‑1 build track record: You’ve built production software from scratch in ambiguous environments. You can point to something that didn’t exist before you showed up and is now used by real people at scale.
• Production AI experience: You’ve shipped AI‑powered solutions in the real world—prompt engineering, agent development, evaluation frameworks, deployment at scale. Not just prototypes.
• Full‑stack technical depth: Strong programming skills across the stack with a deep understanding of and experience with how enterprise systems actually work.
• Business acumen: You can walk into a customer, identify where the real problems are, and connect that diagnosis to a product hypothesis—without being handed a brief.
• Customer instinct: You build trust quickly at every level of an organization, communicate with clarity, and know how to tailor your depth to the room.
• Builder’s judgment: You know what’s actually buildable, how long it will take, and when to simplify scope to get something real into production faster. You spot problems early and solve them independently.
• Curiosity and scrappiness: You’re driven to understand problems deeply before solving them, and resourceful enough to find a path forward when none is obvious.
• Experience: 4+ years in technical roles with a track record of shipping production software. Former technical founders are strongly encouraged to apply.
• Willingness to travel: This role requires 25–50% travel.
• Nice to Have:
  • Experience as a founder, at a top‑tier technology company, or in a forward‑deployed engineering role.
  • A technical degree in CS, engineering, math, or a related field.
  • Deep familiarity with LLMs, retrieval systems, and evaluation frameworks.
  • Experience driving technology adoption inside large enterprises.

Location

• This role is hybrid (3‑4 days a week in our NYC office).
• This role requires 25‑50% travel.

Compensation & Benefits

The standard range for this position is $160,000–$270,000 annually. Compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, level, job‑related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for variable compensation, equity, and benefits. Special Note: This range encompasses varying levels of the role; you will be assessed for your level during the interview process.

We offer a comprehensive benefits package including competitive compensation, Medical, Vision, and Dental coverage, generous time‑off policy, and the opportunity to contribute to your 401k plan to support your long‑term goals. When you join, you’ll receive a home office improvement stipend, as well as annual education and wellness stipends to support your growth and wellbeing. We foster a vibrant company culture through regular events, and provide healthy lunches daily to keep you fueled and focused.

We are a diverse bunch of people and we want to continue to attract and retain a diverse range of people into our organization. We’re committed to an inclusive and diverse company. We do not discriminate based on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, civil or family status, age, disability, or race.

AI‑First Mindset at Glean

At Glean, AI fluency is core to how we work and we’re committed to ensuring every new hire feels confident integrating AI into their everyday work. As part of the interview process, you’ll complete a brief AI‑focused exercise or discussion so we can understand how you think about, design, and use AI to drive impact in your role. Feel free to reference any tools, platforms, or workflows you use today — prior Glean experience isn’t required.

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