Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Optimized, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Optimized, Inc. is building industrial AI for the physical economy, embedding agents into real ERP and planning stacks to drive material, cost, and risk improvements across sourcing, S2P, and S&OP.

You’ll be in the field with operators, shipping integrations and shaping messy plant data to production. You will own deployment outcomes end-to-end, working closely with buyers, planners, and plant stakeholders, and write production code in customer environments to ensure reliable go-live and

Qualifications

• 2-4 years of hands-on software engineering, deployment, or similar hands-on build role.
• Experience owning business outcomes with customers or operators.

Responsibilities

• Embed agents in the stack by connecting the platform to customer ERPs and workflows.
• Work with buyers, planners, and plant stakeholders on the ground to understand constraints.
• Own deployment outcomes from discovery through production (inventory, forecasting, etc.).
• Write production code in customer environments to enable go-live and reliability.
• Provide feedback to engineering from field experiences to improve future deployments.

Skills

APIs

SQL

Python

Customer-facing

Cross-functional

Field deployments

Job description

Optimized is building industrial AI for the physical economy: agents that perceive, reason, and act inside procurement and planning at Fortune 500 manufacturers. This is not SaaS from a distance, and not another dashboard. The agents do the work, chasing suppliers, handling exceptions, and executing decisions under real constraint. Models are not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the customer-facing build: embedding the platform into real stacks, beside real operators, until outcomes show up in production. The stakes are bigger than any one deployment. Western manufacturing hollowed out over decades of offshoring, and it does not come back without the operations to carry it. You'll be on the floors where it gets rebuilt.

As a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll be an IC in the field with substantial customer time: shipping integrations, shaping messy plant and ERP data, configuring agents for how the operation actually runs, and owning go-live. You'll help build the deployment motion from day one alongside a small founding team. Same early ownership as our platform engineers, pointed at the customer-facing build: you ship beside operators and make agents land in production.

Compensation range for this role is $160,000 - $220,000 + equity.

What you'll do

• Embed agents in the stack: You'll connect the platform to customer ERPs and workflows, building integrations, shaping industrial data, and configuring agents for how procurement and planning actually move material, cost, and risk across sourcing, S2P, and S&OP.
• Work beside the operators: You'll sit with buyers, planners, and plant stakeholders on the ground, meet them where they are, learn the real constraints, and earn the trust that turns a live agent into daily work.
• Own outcomes, not demos: You'll take a defined slice of a deployment from discovery through production outcomes (inventory, sourcing efficiency, forecast accuracy) and grow into fuller account ownership as you ramp.
• Ship in the field: You'll write production code in customer environments, unblock go-live, and make the system hold once plants, planners, and buyers depend on it.
• Close the loop with the platform: You'll bring what breaks in the field back to engineering: sharper product instincts and improvements that make the next deployment faster and more reliable.

What you'll bring

• Have 2-4 years of technical experience in software engineering, forward deployment, or another hands-on build role
• Have owned business outcomes with customers or operators, not only shipped internal features
• Are comfortable with APIs, SQL, and Python or similar, and can reason about messy enterprise data
• Can communicate clearly with non-technical stakeholders and work across IT and the business
• Are resourceful and calm under pressure, and like being the one who makes things work
• Want early ownership of how a product lands in the field, and want to build that motion yourself from the ground up
• Bonus: experience in manufacturing, supply chain, or industrials, or in a Palantir- or Anduril-style deployment role