Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Glean; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Vision, and Dental coverage

Generous time-off policy

Home office improvement stipend

Annual education and wellness stipends

Job summary

Glean is seeking a founding member for their forward-deployed team in San Francisco. This role involves discovering and building next-generation AI products, engaging closely with executives, and leading opportunity discovery. Ideal candidates have a track record in production software, AI experience, and a technical background. The position offers hybrid work with 3-4 days in the SF Bay Area and a competitive salary range of $160,000–$270,000, alongside 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 a plus.
• Familiarity with LLMs and retrieval systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead the discovery and build of Glean’s next product surfaces.
• Engage with the C-suite to identify and solve business problems.
• Work closely with R&D team to scale successful solutions.

Skills

Curiosity

Resourcefulness

Technical depth

Business acumen

Customer instinct

Builder's judgment

Experience in AI production

Education

Technical degree in CS or related field

Tools

Programming languages

AI frameworks

Job description

About Glean

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: measurable business impact through faster onboarding, hours of productivity gained each week, and smarter, safer decisions at every level.

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 directly with the C‑suite of the world’s most influential companies and with Glean’s own 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, you 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 one of our SF Bay Area offices).
• 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. The 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 401(k) 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.

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.

Equal Opportunity

We are a diverse organization 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.