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Forward Deployed Strategist

Automat
Full-time
On-site
San Francisco, California, United States
$145,000 - $185,000 USD yearly

What is Automat?

Automat was founded by a diverse group of creative technologists from teams like Google Creative Lab, and Samsung’s innovation Think Tank Team. We envision a future where intelligent agents streamline business operations - and one day, run their own enterprises. We're redefining Enterprise AI Agents (Robotic Process Automation) and Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), developing the necessary tooling and infrastructure to incorporate the advancements of AI into practical, real-world applications.

We value curiosity, collaboration, and impact above rigid requirements. If you're excited about AI and automation, thrive in flexible, creative environments, and want to work on meaningful, pioneering projects, this role is for you.

We encourage anyone to apply - we think talent, passion and your unique perspective can outweigh years of experience. We are really looking for someone who can hit the ground running on day one and contribute at a rapid pace, while also being someone from whom we ourselves can learn from.


The Role


We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineering Lead to guide our world class team of FDEs as they solve high leverage problems for our most complex enterprise customer engagements. You will interface directly with our customers in an effort to solve their pain points and drive real-world operating efficiency and cost savings. You'll help us design and improve upon our customer delivery process, guiding everything from individual deployment timelines to the overall strategic implementation process across our enterprise book of business.

This role is inherently cross-functional - you’ll often be the bridge between product, engineering, and customer teams. It is as important to be comfortable with sales conversations and identifying upsell opportunities as it is to understand how we can expand Automat’s suite of AI-powered product offerings to improve velocity and scale. Success will be measured by impact across all deployments - delivering measurable value against customer goals, driving adoption, and finding avenues to create further engagement with existing customers.


What you’ll do

  • Own the technical delivery for multiple independent workstreams. Translate customer objectives into a plan with milestones, dependencies, and acceptance criteria.

  • Run day-to-day FDE execution. Track and drive delivery across individual customer project teams, ensuring progress is proactively unblocked and sequenced.

  • Define key workflows, tools, and processes for all of our customer deployments.

  • Act as the first technical point of contact for sales, helping scope, define, and qualify potential new customer engagements in a way that helps ground them in a technical manner.

  • Be the eyes and ears for our GTM and Engineering teams to help bridge key objectives across capacity planning and product roadmap development.

What drives you

  • Methodically working through complex technical challenges, no matter how detailed or demanding, until the solution emerges.

  • Efficiency without negatively impacting quality.

  • Collaborating in teams of both technical and non-technical members

  • Standardizing disparate and ambiguous processes so that they become repeatable and scalable as our customers increase in volume and complexity.

What’s in your toolbox

  • Excellent communication and collaboration skills

  • Demonstrated success in leading Enterprise level customer-facing technical roles (e.g., sales engineering, solutions engineering, forward deploy engineering, etc.)

  • Track record of successfully leading large, complex, high-stakes customer engagements where customer outcomes depended on tight engineering coordination and fast decision making

  • Intrinsically pattern match, always stepping back from execution detail to recognise broader trends across deployments in order to turn individual customer needs into scalable, reusable solutions.

What we are looking for

  • Top notch communication and collaboration skills, particularly bridging discussions between technical and non-technical teams

  • Comfort navigating ambiguity and wearing multiple hats

  • Proactive mindset and high initiative, with a bias toward action

  • An intrinsic desire to leave things better than you found them

  • Experience as both an IC and technical leader in startups or other dynamic, high-growth setting