Forward Deployed Engineer

Description

You will work directly with customers rather than taking tickets from a backlog someone else wrote. You will watch how work gets done, prototype alongside the people who will use the software, and take what works into production, owning real product slices from start to finish.

The company is about ten people building custom software for industrial operations, using AI to speed up development. Engineers stay close to customers, so your work is visible, your decisions carry weight, and the people relying on your code know who built it.

The company builds intelligence systems for industrial operators by combining data, systems, and AI, designed around field work. Customers run petrochemical plants and field operations where visibility, safety, and efficiency matter. The products replace spreadsheets, paper, and disconnected tools with software fitted to each customer's real workflow, built on a shared platform.

The stack is React/Next.js and TypeScript on the front end, Node.js with Fastify APIs, PostgreSQL through Prisma, and Azure hosting.

Responsibilities

• Spend time with customers each week in working sessions, demos, and on-site visits, study real workflows, and turn what you learn into well-scoped tickets with clear acceptance criteria.
• Build quick prototypes with customers and the Product and Project Managers to test direction, then harden the ones that work into production-grade features.
• Deliver vertical slices across React/Next.js TypeScript front ends, Fastify APIs on Node.js, and PostgreSQL via Prisma.
• Write the record the team inherits: workflow and integration diagrams, data models, decision rules, and Architecture Decision Records for the important choices.
• Maintain the shared ontology and data models as new customer domains come into scope, reconciling conflicting sources of truth and naming things once.
• Write unit, API, and Playwright end-to-end tests for your work and wire them into CI/CD so regressions surface before customers find them.
• Contribute to the company's Design System and shared packages so what you learn on one product benefits all of them.
• Use AI agents across specification, implementation, and testing, and help decide which new tools join the team's daily practice.
• At 90 days: join customer sessions, ship your first vertical slice to production, and describe a customer's workflow more accurately than the ticket does.
• At six months: own a product area end to end, have customers ask for you by name, and see few change orders because you validated before building.
• At one year: your contributions are essential to the team, and you influence what gets built next, not only how.

Requirements

• Experience shipping full-stack TypeScript products in production using React/Next.js, Node, and a relational database, with live work you can point to.
• Comfort leading working sessions with customers, asking hard questions early, and pushing back when a request is not advisable.
• Ability to model a business domain and document it clearly enough that a customer can confirm it and an engineer can build from it.
• Experience designing APIs with attention to auth, pagination, error handling, and rate limiting, and treating data models, migrations, and security as areas that need careful thought.
• Experience keeping test suites meaningful in CI across unit, API, and end-to-end tests, instead of making them pass by removing tests.
• Preference for shared, reusable solutions over solving the same problem again on each project.
• Curiosity about AI tooling, with the judgment to separate real leverage from novelty.
• Azure (App Service, Functions, Container Apps) and Docker.
• ETL pipelines and data migrations.
• AI-powered features: RAG, embeddings, and evaluation loops.
• Observability: metrics, logs, and traces.
• Prior forward-deployed, consulting, or customer-facing engineering experience.