Pointer — Forward Deployed Engineer

davidjoseph-co; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation support

Meals provided

MacBook Pro

Unlimited PTO

Health insurance

401(k)

Team offsites

Outcome-based schedule

Job summary

Pointer is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join its seed-stage AI company in San Francisco. In this post-sales role you’ll embed with customer teams, map processes, and build agents on top of Pointer’s platform, delivering real impact quickly.

You’ll shadow finance workflows, demonstrate value through demos, and own the post-sales lifecycle. Candidates should be 0–4 years of experience, exceptional communication, and comfortable working hands-on with backend Node, Postgres, and

Qualifications

• Post-sales, customer-facing role in SF with on-site work.
• Strong communication and presentation skills.
• 0–4 years of relevant work experience.
• Experience with enterprise finance workflows is a plus.
• Familiar with Node/React/Postgres stack.

Responsibilities

• Embed with customer teams to learn their operations.
• Build and deploy agents tailored to customers.
• Own the feedback loop to shape platform.
• Present Pointer to customers with demos.
• Handle post-sales implementations and proofs of concept.

Skills

Exceptional communicator

Customer-facing

Post-sales

Commercial acumen

Tools

Node.js

PostgreSQL

React

TypeScript

ML fine-tuning

Job description

Pointer — Forward Deployed Engineer

Type: Full-time | On-site | San Francisco, CACompensation: $180,000–$250,000 + competitive equityHiring count: 3Visa sponsorship: None available — no H-1B, O-1, or OPT. TN status (Canadian citizens) acceptable.Reports to: Not specified on role page

About Pointer

Pointer builds AI systems that take on a company's hardest, multi-day, hundred-step processes end-to-end and verify the output, so people can finally come out of the loop. Today it works with finance and accounting teams at operationally complex enterprises — reconciliation across physical and digital systems, invoice and PO matching, month-end close — where being almost right costs the same as being wrong. Recently raised a seed round.

Founded: 2025 | Team size: 1–10 (Seed) | Total funding: Seed round (undisclosed)Industry: Applied AI / agentic automation for finance & accounting operationsWebsite: pointer.aiOffice: San Francisco

Why Candidates Should Join

• Ground-floor FDE at a seed-stage AI company: own how Pointer lands with customers and shape a function from the start, with a real path to grow into leading all of post-sales.
• Deeply customer-facing with a direct product loop: patterns found in the field feed straight back into what gets built into the platform.
• Strong package and environment: $180–250K + competitive equity (they aim to beat other offers), relocation support to SF, all meals covered, top-spec MacBook Pro, unlimited PTO, full health, 401(k), team offsites, and an outcome-based schedule.

The Role

A post-sales Forward Deployed Engineer role: implementing and building atop Pointer's platform for customers, not heavy custom engineering or core product work. One day you're shadowing a finance team to map how they close the books, the next you're wiring up computer-use agents against their actual systems, the next you're showing their CAO that a week of work now takes an hour.

What You'll Be Doing

• Embed with customer teams to learn how their operations actually run — shadowing experts, mapping decision logic, capturing tribal knowledge
• Build and deploy agents tailored to each customer's systems, edge cases, and operational reality (on and atop the platform)
• Own the feedback loop so field patterns directly shape what gets built into the platform
• Present Pointer to customers and prospects with sharp narration and real design taste, sequencing demos around their specific workflows
• Handle implementation and delivery throughout the post-sales lifecycle, including paid PSCs (proofs of concept — counted as post-sales, since the customer has already signed)

Tech stack: Computer-use agents against customer systems; generalist range useful — backend (Node, Postgres), frontend (React/TypeScript), ML-adjacent (fine-tuning / agent configuration)

Requirements

• Commercial ability first, technical baseline second
• Exceptional communicator
• 0-4 YOE
• Post-sales, customer-facing
• SF, mostly 5 days in person
• TN (Canada) ok; no H-1B/O-1/OPT

Green Flags

• Communicates experience cleanly and concisely (no rambling, over-long bios)
• Groks quickly and reads between the lines
• Consulting, solutions-engineering, or external/customer-facing background
• Worked at a strong company; FDE experience at Palantir, Sierra, or Databricks is an admired archetype
• Generalist engineer with real presentation/design taste

Red Flags

• Weak or long-winded communication; can't present themselves crisply
• Purely non-technical (no baseline technical understanding at all)
• Purely back-office engineer with no customer-facing ability or interest
• Needs heavy structure/hand-holding rather than owning ambiguous outcomes

Role Details

• Salary — $180,000–$250,000
• Equity — Competitive
• On-site policy — In person in SF, mostly 5 days a week; relocation support provided
• Visa sponsorship — None available; no H-1B/O-1/OPT; TN (Canadian citizens) acceptable
• Employment type — Full-time
• Location — San Francisco, CA

Interview Process

Stage 1 — Pending Approval — Candidates awaiting initial approval.Stage 2 — Intro CallStage 3 — Behavioral call with a co-founderStage 4 — Take-home assessmentStage 5 — On-siteStage 6 — Offer ExtendedStage 7 — Hired — Candidate accepts and starts.