Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

Forward Deployed Engineers are our zero-to-one team. You embed directly with portfolio companies, understand their domain deeply, and solve the novel, high-stakes problems that turn legacy operations into AI-native businesses. You're here to break the back of hard problems, prove transformation hypotheses, and extract generalizable patterns that become platform across our entire portfolio.

Each acquisition is a new deployment. You'll inherit complex workflows, fragmented data, and skeptical operators. Your job is to ship working AI systems that deliver measurable business outcomes - then codify what worked into playbooks that accelerate every future acquisition

What you will do

Portfolio Company Embedding & Domain Mastery

• Embed on-site with newly acquired companies to deeply understand their business, workflows, and pain points
• Sit with end users—operators, managers, frontline staff—to understand adoption blockers and build trust
• Pick genuinely high-stakes problems at the core of the business, not peripheral edge cases

Zero-to-One Delivery

• Build highly scalable, data-driven platforms that connect to legacy IT systems
• Build AI-powered applications leveraging cutting-edge LLMs—voice agents, workflow automation, intelligent assistants
• Define the software architecture and code the product, applying ML as a major differentiator
• Implement eval-driven development: every piece of LLM-written code isn't done until you have evals verifying efficacy

Trust-Building & Adoption

• Build guardrails that protect against runtime failures while maintaining flexibility
• Technical solutions are only half the battle—driving adoption through demonstrated reliability is the other half

Playbook Development & Product Extraction

• Identify patterns across portfolio companies that can become reusable frameworks or platform products
• Contribute to transformation playbooks that reduce time-to-value for each subsequent acquisition
• Work with product teams to graduate successful solutions from bespoke implementations to scalable product

What we look for

• BSc. or MSc. in Computer Science or comparable degree
• At least 5 years of hands-on coding experience as a full-stack or backend-heavy engineer
• Exceptional problem-solving abilities, effective communication, and teamwork skills
• Comfort with ambiguity—you can walk into a newly acquired company with legacy systems and make order from chaos

Core Engineering Craft

• Ship production systems, not just prototypes—you've taken things from zero to deployed
• Comfortable across the stack, but depth in at least one area (backend, frontend, data)
• Experience integrating with legacy systems, messy APIs, and undocumented data sources
• Strong debugging instincts—you can diagnose problems in systems you didn't build

AI/LLM Systems

• Hands-on experience building with LLMs—prompting, RAG, agents, tool use
• Eval-driven development mindset: you instinctively think "how do I measure if this is working?" Whether it’s on data, tests, or dollars.
• Understanding of when to use determinism vs. probabilistic approaches—LLMs for nuance, hard rules for things that must be right 100% of the time

Domain Learning & Systems Thinking

• Ability to rapidly learn new industries—you've gone deep on domains outside your background
• Experience mapping complex business workflows and identifying high-leverage intervention points
• Comfort with ambiguity: you can walk into a messy environment and create structure
• Pattern recognition: you spot what's generalizable vs. one-off

Communication & Trust-Building

• Experience working directly with end users to drive adoption—not just shipping, but getting people to actually use what you build.
• Ability to translate between technical teams and business stakeholders
• Comfort presenting to executives and explaining trade-offs in non-technical terms

Bonus Points

• Experience in a similar role, early-stage startups, or technical consulting roles (MBB)
• Background in specific verticals: financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, debt collection
• Contributions to open-source AI tooling or frameworks
• Experience with post-acquisition integration or operating in high-ambiguity environment

Why This Role Is Exciting

• Repeatable impact: Every acquisition is a new deployment of the patterns you've built—your work compounds. You will drive millions of EBITDA.
• Product influence: Your implementations directly shape what becomes platform across the portfolio
• Frontier technology: You're deploying AI capabilities to transform legacy industries that haven't seen innovation in decades
• Learning velocity: Every portfolio company is a masterclass in a new domai

We encourage you to apply, even if you don't meet all the criteria.