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Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

DRH Search
Full-time
On-site
San Francisco, California, United States
We're assisting a well-funded startup with their search for Founding Forward Deployed Engineers.  Their product helps AI teams turn complex documents into LLM-ready inputs with exceptional accuracy.  This role will work onsite in the SF office.
 
What you'll do:
  • Deploying and maintaining on-prem and VPC instances of the systems, often with complex enterprise constraints (e.g. air-gapped, custom auth, strict latency targets).

  • Building tooling to make deployments faster, more reliable, and easier to debug.

  • Creating diagnostics, dashboards, and eval harnesses to measure performance and track regressions across environments.

  • Writing crisp internal documentation and playbooks for repeatable deployments.

  • Collaborating closely with customers, support, and core engineers to identify high-impact improvements.

  • Acting as a feedback loop to the product and infra teams—surfacing usability gaps, unmet needs, and opportunities to deepen customer value.

  • Working directly with the founders and customers to shape the product direction and engineering strategy

Ideal Candidate Traits:
  • You have a high bar for quality and don’t rest until the job is done right—no settling for 90%. We want someone who ships fast, with high agency, and who doesn't just voice problems but actively jumps in to fix them.
  • You have 3 to 6 years of experience deploying software in production settings—ideally with enterprise or regulated customers.

  • You're excellent with Python and can navigate Bash and infrastructure as needed.

  • You're very comfortable with Kubernetes.

  • Tools: Build your own tools as needed—like a quick Streamlit app to test hypotheses or create a dataset.

  • Approach: A quantitative approach to building products. Ability to debug, experiment, and iterate fast. You should be comfortable getting hands-on with the full development lifecycle, from ideation to shipping to users.

Nice to haves:
  • Prior experience founding a company or building products at early stages

  • You are ambitious and driven, and care a lot about doing great work with great people

  • You keep up with the latest developments in ML/AI