Job Details

Forward Deployed Engineer

  2026-05-22     HartleyCo     Santa Rosa,CA  
Description:

I'm working with a YC startup building AI systems that are being deployed directly into real-world enterprise workflows.

They've recently raised their Seed round, signed initial customers, and are now looking for a highly technical engineer who wants to operate closer to the business, product, and customer problems rather than sitting in a siloed engineering function.

This is not a traditional solutions engineer role.

You'll be:

  • building AI agents
  • writing production code
  • designing infrastructure
  • deploying systems into customer environments
  • working directly with enterprise stakeholders to solve operational problems

The founders are specifically looking for engineers who can both:

  1. build at a high technical level
  2. communicate clearly with customers

The backgrounds they tend to like:

  • early engineers at AI startups
  • Palantir / FDSE-style profiles
  • strong backend or product engineers from high-calibre engineering companies
  • engineers already building with LLMs, agents, or AI-native tooling

What makes the role interesting:

  • Very early-stage with real traction already
  • Small, high-agency team
  • Direct founder exposure
  • Real ownership from day one
  • AI-native engineering culture
  • Fast-moving environment with very little bureaucracy
  • Opportunity to shape both product and technical direction early

Tech stack:

  • Python
  • Node.js / TypeScript
  • APIs + integrations
  • AI agents / LLM systems
  • cloud infrastructure
  • production deployments

You'll likely enjoy this if:

  • you like building quickly
  • you enjoy ambiguity
  • you want your work close to customers/users
  • you prefer ownership over process
  • you're excited by agentic AI systems rather than traditional SaaS

Bay Area onsite preferred.


Apply for this Job

Please use the APPLY HERE link below to view additional details and application instructions.

Apply Here

Back to Search