Founding Senior Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

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

Job summary

Afresh in San Francisco is building the team that embeds AI inside the largest grocers in the US. You’ll lead the forward deployed engineers who integrate with customer data, shipping AI atop it, and you’ll own the technical plan alongside a Deployment Strategist.

This player-coach role focuses on leadership, architecture reviews, and hands-on problem solving when needed. Expect 25–40% travel to customer sites and direct impact on scale.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering or related field.
• 2+ years managing engineers in a services or forward deployed org.
• Experience leading multi-customer deployments and architectures.
• Fluent in data platforms and AI deployments across enterprise environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead forward deployed engineers, set technical bar and standards for customer work.
• Oversee execution across concurrent customer engagements: what gets built, in what order, and quality.
• Staff engagements across accounts, balancing customer needs, team development and platform needs.
• Run regular 1:1s and invest in career growth for engineers.
• Review architectures and code when required and lead technical discovery with accounts.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Team building

Executive presence

Architectural thinking

Production AI/LLM experience

Tools

SQL

Databricks

BigQuery

Snowflake

Job description

Afresh, the AI platform for grocery, began by tackling the most complex problem in the industry: fresh, and has evolved into the core AI platform for grocers.

By leveraging proprietary AI designed for high-volatility environments, we empower partners like Albertsons, Meijer, and Wakefern to drive smarter decisions across their entire enterprise.

Following record-breaking 70% revenue growth in 2025, we have scaled to 6 enterprise-grade solutions, with solutions live in over 10% of the U.S. grocery market. Our platform now orchestrates billions of decisions from the store floor to the distribution center and prevented over 200 million pounds of food waste last year alone.

If you're looking for a role where your work directly translates into massive scale and social good, and you want to be part of the team that defines how the world eats, there is no better time to join us.

This is a hybrid role requiring 3 days/week in San Francisco

About The Role

Afresh is building the team that deploys our AI inside the largest grocers in the US.

You’ll build and lead the team of forward deployed engineers who embed with our enterprise grocery customers, integrating into their data, shipping AI systems on top of it, and hardening what works into our platform. You’ll own the technical relationship with each customer's engineering leaders, and you’ll partner with the Deployment Strategist who owns the account to plan and sequence the work.

This is a player-coach role with a strong bias toward leadership. You’ll review architecture, unblock your engineers, and get into the code when an account needs it, but most of your week goes to leading the team’s execution and to customer stakeholders rather than to personally building. This team will be part of an existing AI engineering group, but will be built and scaled from the ground up.

We're looking for an architect rather than a specialist. You should be able to hold a grocer's data estate and our platform in view at the same time and judge where the two meet, without needing to be the deepest expert in any single layer.

Lead the team

• Hire, develop and retain forward deployed engineers. Set the technical bar and the standard for how the team works with customers.
• Lead execution across concurrent customer engagements: what gets built, in what order, and to what quality bar.
• Staff engagements across accounts, making resourcing calls that balance customer need, team development and what the platform needs next.
• Run regular 1:1s and invest in career growth. Several of our engineers are strong builders doing customer-facing work for the first time.
• Stay hands‑on enough to review architectures and code, lead technical discovery sessions, and debug alongside your team when an account calls for it.

Own the technical relationship

• Be the senior technical partner to each customer's engineering and data leadership. Set the delivery roadmap with them, defend the architecture behind it, and tell them early when something slips.
• Partner with the Deployment Strategist on overall account execution. They own the customer relationship and the commercial picture; you own the technical plan and whether it lands.
• Turn a broad business goal, like reducing shrink, into a scoped program with a sequence, a cost and a date.
• Work out how each customer actually operates, most of which is undocumented: what they mean by an "item," who signs off on a markdown, which exception path the DC team uses every week. The real constraint is usually not the stated objection.

Own the architecture across accounts

• Own one reference architecture for AIE that holds across deployments, covering our current hosted default and the customer‑cloud exceptions, so platform features ship once rather than once per customer.
• Decide what gets hardened into the shared platform, what gets built for a single customer, and what we decline to build.
• Set production standards for reliability, security review, data residency, and the evals and tracing that show whether a deployed AI system is actually working.

Close the loop into the platform

• Partner with our platform engineers to turn field learnings into product, so each deployment costs less than the one before it.
• Build the repeatable playbooks, scoping templates and starter repos that capture what the team learns in the field.
• Travel to customer sites roughly 25-40%, weighted toward engagement kickoffs and readouts.

What Makes You a Great Fit

We encourage all highly‑qualified candidates to apply, even if they do not fulfill all the listed criteria.

• 10+ years in software engineering, solutions architecture, consulting or a technical customer‑facing role, including 2+ years managing engineers in a services, post‑sales or forward deployed organization.
• Experience building a team from 0 to 1 rather than inheriting one: hiring, setting standards, and defining what good looks like.
• Executive presence, with the ability to move between a roadmap conversation with a customer's VP of Data and a debugging session with your own engineer.
• Architect's range across ingestion, data modeling, application and AI, with the judgment to see how the pieces fit and where the risk sits.
• Real data fluency. You can open an unfamiliar enterprise data model and tell within a day which parts are trustworthy, and you plan around dirty data rather than being surprised by it mid‑deployment. Fluent in SQL and a modern cloud data platform such as Databricks, BigQuery or Snowflake.
• A track record of working out how a business actually runs when none of it is written down: what it treats as real, how work moves through it, which rules are policy and which are one person's habit.
• Production AI and LLM experience across retrieval, tool use and agentic workflows, with the habit of measuring quality rather than eyeballing it.
• Experience delivering inside someone else's enterprise: their cloud, their security review, their change management, their politics.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites roughly 25-40%.

Nice to Have

• Grocery, retail or supply chain data.
• Having built a forward deployed, professional services or solutions engineering function from scratch.
• Knowledge graphs, ontologies or semantic layers running in production.
• Delivering the same product both vendor‑hosted and inside a customer's own cloud, and owning the abstraction between them.

Why Afresh?

• We're a mission‑driven company that eliminates hundreds of millions of pounds of food waste in grocery stores every year, so your work has direct and visible impact.
• You'd found the forward deployed team: its people, its standards and the way it works. That's rare at a company already in production with enterprise customers.
• This team reports into engineering, not sales. The job is deciding which customer problems are worth solving once for everyone, rather than closing the account in front of you.
• You’ll stay technical. We want an architect who manages, not a manager who used to be technical.
• Be part of an engineering culture that’s genuinely AI‑forward — we want to be on the bleeding edge of agentic development, not watching from the sidelines.
• Collaborative, supportive environment & awesome people.

Salary Band in U.S. (USD): $203,745 - $275,655 + meaningful early‑stage equity + benefits

Why You’ll Love Working at Afresh

• Comprehensive Health & Wellness: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family, with the majority of premiums covered by Afresh. We also provide dedicated mental health support and counseling services.
• Invested in Your Future: Competitive base salary, meaningful equity (U.S. employees), and a 401(k) program with a generous company match.
• Flexible & Modern Workspace: Whether you work from home or a local office, we support your setup with a home office stipend and "Coworking Wallets" for flexible workspace access.
• Growth‑Obsessed Culture: We believe in continuous learning. Every employee receives an annual professional development budget to master new skills and grow their career at Afresh.
• Holistic Monthly Stipends: Beyond your paycheck, we provide monthly stipends for "Betterment" (wellness/lifestyle) and telecommunications to ensure you have what you need to thrive.
• Time to Recharge: Flexible paid time off to take the time you need to recharge.
• Full‑time U.S. employees are eligible for these benefits.

About Afresh

Founded in 2017, Afresh is using AI to tackle the #1 solution to curb climate change: reducing food waste. By building AI specifically for the intricacies of grocery—from the fresh perimeter to the center store we help grocers minimize waste and maximize sales.

Afresh sits at an incredible intersection of positive social impact, rocket ship financial growth, and cutting‑edge technology. Our best‑in‑class AI research has been published in top journals, including ICML, and our investors include Al Gore’s Just Climate, former Whole Foods Market CEO Walter Robb, and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors.

Grocery is the past, present, and future of our food system – the waste we create today will impact our planet for years to come. Join us as we continue to build a vibrant, diverse, and inclusive team that embodies our company’s values of proactivity, kindness, candor, and humility.

Afresh provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.

Here at Afresh, many of our employees work remotely provided that they reside in one of the following states: AL, AR, CA, CO, FL, GA, IL, KY, MA, MI, MT, MO, NV, NJ, NY, NC, OR, PA, TX, WA, UT, VA, WI