Morning Stack · hiring index

Forward Deployed Engineer

autena · San Francisco

Listed by autena on Ashby, posted 2026-09-25 · last seen 2026-09-26. Read directly from the company's applicant-tracking system, not LinkedIn or Indeed.

From the company's job description

THE OPPORTUNITY

We're building at the frontier of what applied AI can do inside real work — the operational core of an industry that moves the physical economy. One of the largest on earth, essential, and almost entirely untouched by modern AI. It still runs on people, spreadsheets, and software written before the internet.

We went vertical first on purpose. Vertical is where the hard problems live: messy inputs, real consequences for being wrong, decades of institutional knowledge nobody wrote down. Anything that works here has been tested against reality in a way horizontal tooling never is.

And it doesn't stay vertical. The systems we're building — how work gets decomposed, verified, corrected, and learned from — aren't specific to one industry. They're specific to work. The vertical is the proving ground. The reapplication is the company.

We're deliberately quiet about which industry until we talk. What we'll say now: it's enormous, it's overlooked, and the incumbents aren't coming. You'll get the full picture on the first call.

WHY THIS MIGHT BE INTERESTING

THE SEAT

You're the engineer who goes where the work actually happens.

Every deployment lands in a real operation with its own data, its own exceptions, and its own way of doing things nobody documented. Getting from works in the demo to works here is engineering, not project management — and it's the difference between a design partner and a customer.

You sit with the people doing the job, watch what they actually do rather than what the process doc says, and then build. Sometimes that's configuration and data mapping. Sometimes it's writing the thing that doesn't exist yet. Then you carry what you learned back into core product, so the next deployment is easier than the last — and eventually the last mile stops being a mile.

Where this sits: the Customer Success Manager owns the relationship and the outcome. You own the technical reality underneath it. You'll work in tandem constantly, and you're the one writing code.

WHO YOU ARE

THE STACK

Python · SQL · FastAPI · PostgreSQL · AWS

REFERRAL BOUNTY

Know someone exceptional? Introduce us. If we hire them into a full-time role, we'll send you $5,000.

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