Founding Forward-Deployed Engineer: On-Site AI Deployments

Skiffra; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Retirement plans

Job summary

Skiffra is seeking a Forward-Deployed Engineer to work directly with customers, spending significant time on site to translate complex operational problems into deployable Skiffra platform solutions.

You will own the end-to-end technical path from discovery to deployment, including data mapping, integrations, validation, and production readiness, while shaping product requirements from field feedback.

Qualifications

• At least four years of relevant experience in software, data engineering, systems integration, enterprise technology, technology startups, technical consulting, or a similarly demanding client-facing environment.
• Experience leading ambiguous customer-facing technical work from discovery through a deployed outcome
• The judgment and communication skills to earn credibility with customer executives, IT teams, frontline operators, and Skiffra's product and engineering teams
• Strong computer science fundamentals and the ability to reason clearly about systems, data models, APIs, infrastructure, security, and technical tradeoffs
• Experience working with data and integrations using tools such as SQL, Python, APIs, cloud services, or enterprise platforms
• The judgment to connect technical decisions to customer operations and business outcomes, rather than treating the requested feature as the whole problem
• High ownership and comfort working through ambiguity, incomplete information, and unfamiliar operating environments
• An AI-native working style: you use modern AI tools fluently to investigate, analyze, document, and move faster while maintaining judgment and accuracy
• Willingness to travel up to 50% and spend meaningful time at customer sites, including industrial and remote locations
• Ability to work from Los Angeles or San Francisco

Responsibilities

• Embed with customer teams to understand their operations, systems, data, constraints, and most consequential problems
• Understand the operational and economic significance of the problem, including the effect on throughput, cost, reliability, risk, or time
• Turn ambiguous customer needs into clear technical problems, solution designs, deployment plans, and measures of success
• Design integrations across customer systems, APIs, databases, identity systems, ERP platforms, historians, and other operational technology
• Configure and deploy the Skiffra platform in customer environments, including data mapping, workflow setup, testing, validation, and production readiness
• Diagnose technical problems across Skiffra, customer systems, data pipelines, infrastructure, permissions, and third-party services
• Work directly with operators and business leaders to ensure the deployed solution reflects how the operation works and improves a meaningful outcome
• Partner closely with product and platform engineers through implementation, then validate that what ships works under real operating conditions
• Identify missing platform capabilities and distinguish customer-specific requests from recurring patterns that should become reusable platform capabilities
• Translate those findings into clear, evidence-based requirements for Skiffra's product and engineering team
• Document deployment patterns and help build the methods, tools, and playbooks that make future deployments faster and more repeatable

Skills

CS fundamentals

System reasoning

Customer facing

Decision making

AI-native working style

Travel readiness

Location flexibility LA/SF

Tools

SQL

Python

APIs

Cloud services

ERP systems

SAP

Wonderware

PI

Historian

Job description

Skiffra is seeking a Forward-Deployed Engineer to work directly with customers, spending significant time on site to translate complex operational problems into deployable Skiffra platform solutions.

You will own the end-to-end technical path from discovery to deployment, including data mapping, integrations, validation, and production readiness, while shaping product requirements from field feedback.