Founding Forward Deployed Engineer (up to $220k)

Dex; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Dex is building AI agents that automate strategic decisions in manufacturing operations and sits atop ERP systems. This founding role blends engineering with customer work as you translate customer challenges into product improvements and prototype solutions under leadership guidance.

You will own end-to-end implementations, from scoping to integration, directly collaborating with the CEO and CTO to productize deep operational knowledge and scale the product.

Qualifications

• At least two years of full-time professional experience and customer-facing work.
• Demonstrated ability to turn user problems into intuitive, performant features.
• Ability to write production-grade code and prototype features yourself.
• Systems thinking to design scalable processes in code and operations.
• Fluency in German is a plus given the current customer base.

Responsibilities

• Translate complex manufacturing operational problems into product features.
• Prototype and write production-grade code to implement new features and fixes.
• Own customer implementations end-to-end: scoping, onboarding, integration, and training.
• Extract reusable features, data models, and playbooks from each rollout; shape core product with leadership.

Skills

Customer-facing

Product architect mindset

Production coding

Systems thinking

German language

Job description

The role

This company builds AI agents that automate strategic decisions in manufacturing operations, sitting on top of ERP systems. Their customers are large manufacturers, currently in Germany and expanding to the US. Every deployment reveals new insights into complex operations. The mission: turn these bespoke learnings into a scalable product. They are backed by leading investors and a talent-dense team.
You will be the founding Forward Deployed Engineer. This is a rare seat: roughly half engineering, half customer work. You'll sit with users, translate their operational challenges into product improvements, then prototype and build the solutions yourself. You own implementations end-to-end, from scoping to integration, working directly with the CEO and CTO to shape the product. This isn't a pure engineering role, nor is it just customer success; it's about productizing deep operational knowledge with zero handholding.

The work

• Translate complex manufacturing operational problems into product features.
• Prototype and write production-grade code to implement new features and fixes.
• Own customer implementations end-to-end: scoping, onboarding, integration, and training.
• Extract reusable features, data models, and playbooks from each customer rollout, directly shaping the core product with leadership.

What You Bring

• At least two years of full-time professional experience; you'll be customer-facing from day one.
• A product architect mindset: you turn complex user frustrations into intuitive, performant features.
• Ability to write production code and prototype features yourself, not just hand off specs.
• Systems thinking: you design scalable processes in code, operations, and human workflows, defaulting to data and automation.
• Fluency in German is a significant advantage, given the current customer base.

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