Forward Deployed Engineer

Beacon acquires and operates a portfolio of vertical SaaS companies. Most private equity firms scale by adding people. Beacon is built to scale by adding software. The thesis: portfolio operations, value creation, and deal sourcing are bottlenecked by human attention, and an agentic operating system can lift that ceiling by an order of magnitude.

The system has two pieces. A sensing layer is a cross-portfolio data lake on open table formats with a feature store that makes data agent-readable. An action layer runs workflows across how Beacon runs the portfolio, grows it, and acquires into it. Underneath both sits a feedback loop that captures every action and outcome with stable identifiers.

Beacon has raised $550M+ from investors including General Catalyst, Lightspeed, D1 Capital, CPMG, and the family offices of the founders of Stripe, DoorDash, and Ramp.

The Opportunity

Forward Deployed Engineers at Beacon go where the work is. You will be embedded with one or two portfolio companies at a time — sitting with the GM, the operators, and the customer success lead — figuring out where the leverage is and shipping agentic software directly into their operation. The platforms exist. You are the person who turns them into outcomes on a specific business.

This is a Palantir-style FDE role applied to private equity operations. You will spend a meaningful fraction of your time on-site or in the portco's tools, and the rest pulling patterns back into the platform at Beacon HQ. The best FDEs will not just deliver for the portcos they are deployed at — they will compress what they learned into reusable playbooks that ship to every other portco in the same vertical.

This is not a consulting role. The deliverable is a running system, not a slide deck.

What You'll Do

• •      Embed with portcos to understand the operating model from the inside: what the GM cares about, where revenue comes from, where time goes, and where the system is leaking — before you start changing things
• •      Identify the 2-3 workflows where agentic software will meaningfully change the trajectory of the business — churn-save, pricing experiments, lead enrichment, support deflection, AR follow-up, or whatever the specific portco needs — and pick the wedge, not the wish list
• •      Build the integrations, prompts, evals, workflows, and UI surfaces required to land the first agentic loop; use the platforms the core engineering team is building and extend them when they fall short
• •      Stay close to the system after it ships — watch the outcomes, tune the prompts, adjust the autonomy tier as the system earns trust, and hand off cleanly to portfolio ops once the loop is stable
• •      Bring the patterns back to HQ and codify what worked into playbooks that ship to every other portco in the vertical; the 11th deployment in a home-services SaaS should be 10x faster than the 1st
• •      Carry the GM relationship as the technical face of Beacon to the portco — build trust, set expectations, and make sure the GM sees the system as their leverage, not Beacon's audit tool

You Should Have

• •      Strong generalist engineering skills — full-stack TypeScript or Python on the backend, React on the frontend, SQL fluently, comfortable in someone else's codebase within a day
• •      Real experience shipping LLM-native software in production — not toy demos; you know how to write evals, when to fine-tune, how to keep an agentic workflow from going off the rails, and where the autonomy tier should sit for a given action class
• •      Customer obsession — you take the problem the operator actually has, not the problem they described, and you are not interested in building platforms nobody uses
• •      High autonomy and low ego — you can make calls without a committee, defend them when challenged, and change your mind when you are wrong
• •      Operator instincts — you can read a P&L, understand why a churn-save matters more than a feature launch this quarter, and size the value of a workflow improvement in business terms
• •      Strong written communication — you will write the wedge memo, the GM update, the post-deployment retro, and the playbook that ships to every portco in the vertical

Nice to Have

• •      Prior FDE experience
• •      PE, consulting, or M&A diligence exposure, particularly post-LOI integration
• •      Comfort with Iceberg-based data platforms such as Snowflake or Databricks and event-driven systems
• •      Experience building or operating agentic systems in production including evals, autonomy gating, and outcome tracking