Forward Deployed Engineer

After three years developing the underlying technology, the client is now scaling rapidly, growing around 5x year-on-year , with customers including major technology companies such as Notion, ElevenLabs, Dropbox, Discord, and Wiz.

The company has raised $20M in Series A funding and typically works on $100k+ enterprise contracts , backed by investors including founders of Vercel, Datadog, Segment, and Dropbox.

The Role:

This is an early Forward Deployed Engineer hire, working closely with the core engineering team and reporting directly to the CTO.

It is a highly technical, customer-facing engineering role . You’ll own customers from initial technical discovery and pilot through integration, deployment, and expansion.

Around 80-90% of the role will involve customer interaction , but this is not a traditional Solutions Architect or pre-sales position. You’ll continue to write production code, debug complex systems, and contribute changes to the core product.

What You'll Do:

• Work directly with VPs of Engineering, Staff+ Engineers, and technical leaders at high-growth technology companies.
• Understand complex customer architectures and design robust integrations.
• Write and ship production code to unblock customer deployments.
• Build new product functionality where customer requirements expose gaps in the platform.
• Lead technical pilots and own customer relationships end-to-end.
• Feed customer learnings directly into the product roadmap .
• Help build the FDE playbook, tooling, and processes from the ground up.

Requirements:

• Exceptional technical ability and strong recent hands-on coding experience .
• Experience in a demanding, high-growth startup environment is highly valued.
• Strong problem-solving and debugging skills, with the ability to navigate complex and unfamiliar systems .
• Excellent communication skills and confidence working directly with senior engineering leaders.
• A pragmatic, ownership-driven approach to solving customer problems.Strong academic background preferred, particularly a Computer Science degree from a top university .

Strong Plus -

• Founding engineer or early-stage startup experience.
• Competitive programming.
• Significant open-source contributions.
• Demonstrable history of programming from an early age.

The Ideal Candidate

The ideal candidate is a highly technical software engineer who wants significantly more customer exposure . You enjoy getting deep into unfamiliar systems, solving difficult technical problems, and working directly with customers to get things shipped.

You should be equally comfortable debugging a complex codebase, writing production code, and discussing architecture with a VP of Engineering .

Cavendish (Recruitment) Professionals Ltd are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and we believe that inclusivity begins with the candidate experience. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment regardless of gender, race, age, sexual orientation, religion, or belief.