Founding Lead, Forward-Deployed AI Engineering

Afresh; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 204,000 - 276,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health coverage

401(k) matching

Home office stipend

Professional development

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Afresh is building the team that deploys our AI inside the largest grocers in the US. You will lead a forward deployed engineering team embedded with customers, owning the technical relationship and driving architecture reviews, roadmaps, and scalable practices.

This player-coach role emphasizes leadership, with hands-on review of architectures and code when needed, while weekdays focus on execution and stakeholder alignment across accounts.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering, solutions architecture, consulting or a technical customer-facing role.
• 2+ years managing engineers in a services or forward deployed organization.
• Experience building a team from 0 to 1 and defining standards.
• Executive presence enabling roadmaps with senior stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead the forward deployed engineering team across customer engagements.
• Review architectures and unblock engineers; contribute when needed.
• Define delivery roadmaps with customer leadership and plan sequencing of work.
• Translate business goals into scoped programs with cost, date and milestones.
• Own reference architecture for Afresh's AI platform across deployments.

Skills

Leadership

Architectural design

Team building

Executive presence

SQL

Cloud data platforms

Tools

Databricks

BigQuery

Snowflake

Kubernetes

Job description

Afresh is building the team that deploys our AI inside the largest grocers in the US. You will lead a forward deployed engineering team embedded with customers, owning the technical relationship and driving architecture reviews, roadmaps, and scalable practices.

This player-coach role emphasizes leadership, with hands-on review of architectures and code when needed, while weekdays focus on execution and stakeholder alignment across accounts.