Forward Deployed Engineer

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Role Overview

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you are the engineer on the front line of customer value. You’ll embed directly with strategic customers, understand their real business problems, and turn our platform and products into production systems that move the needle on customer outcomes.

You’ll spend most of your time writing and shipping production code in customer environments, integrating systems, building AI/ML-powered workflows, and deploying and supporting production deployments end-to-end until they’re stable, adopted, and delivering measurable outcomes.

This is an engineering-first role with deep customer exposure: you’ll work closely with senior stakeholders from business and technical teams on the customer side, travel on-site when it makes sense, and act as their trusted technical partner. Success is measured in value delivered, user adoption, and accumulation of platform and product leverage.

What You’ll Own

Customer value & outcomes

• Own the technical success of deployments for a portfolio of strategic customers – from discovery and design through go-live and scale-out.

• Translate ambiguous customer goals (“reduce manual review time”, “improve CS efficiency”, “cut claim processing costs”) into concrete technical roadmaps and implementation plans leveraging and extending our platform and products.

• Define and track deployment KPIs (latency, accuracy, throughput, adoption, business impact) and continuously tune systems to hit them.

End-to-end solution design & implementation

• Design and implement full-stack solutions: backend services, data pipelines, integrations, and customer-facing assistants and workflows.

• Build and harden production AI systems – including LLM- and agent-based workflows, knowledge pipelines, and domain-specific orchestration.

• Integrate with customer infrastructure (APIs, data warehouses, identity, CRM/ERP, internal services) across one or more major clouds.

Deployment, reliability & support

• Own deployment lifecycles: proofs-of-value, pilots, phased rollouts, and post-go-live stabilization.

• Debug gnarly production issues in unfamiliar environments, often under tight time pressure, and drive them to root cause and fix.

• Establish monitoring, observability, and runbooks so customers can operate solutions with confidence.

Customer collaboration & advisory

• Work side-by-side with customer engineers – pairing on code, reviewing designs, and guiding architecture decisions.

• Communicate trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders and help them make informed decisions without drowning them in jargon.

• Influence customer teams to adopt best practices for AI, data, and software delivery – even when it means challenging their current approach.

Product feedback loop

• Bring structured feedback from the field back into our product and engineering roadmap: common integration patterns, missing features, recurring edge cases, and opportunities to productize bespoke work.

• Help shape our forward deployed playbook: reusable templates, reference architectures, example repos, and internal tooling that make future deployments faster and more repeatable.

What You Bring

• Technical depth (you’re an engineer first)

• 3–10 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems.

• Strong coding skills in Python plus experience with TypeScript/JavaScript or another modern language; comfortable working full-stack when needed.

• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and with containers/orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes or equivalent).

• Practical experience with modern AI/LLM tooling: building agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, or integrating LLMs into real products.

• Comfortable reading other people’s codebases quickly and making safe changes in unfamiliar environments.

Customer-facing engineering skills

• Proven track record working directly with customers or stakeholders to deliver complex technical projects (consulting, implementation, solutions/field engineering, or similar).

• Excellent communication skills – you can explain technical constraints and risks to a VP in plain language without oversimplifying.

• High ownership and collaboration mindset even while owning your informed opinions

Delivery and ways of working

• Bias to action: you’re comfortable moving from rough requirements to working prototypes quickly, then iterating in front of real users.

• Ability to operate in ambiguous, changing environments – switching between customers, industries, and tech stacks without losing momentum.

• Willingness to travel periodically to embed on-site with key customers when it materially accelerates deployment success.

Nice to have

• Experience deploying systems in regulated or complex industries (financial services, government/defense, healthcare, insurance, energy, etc.).

• Background in startups or growth-stage companies where every deployment materially influenced product direction.

Pay:

The wage range for this role takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.  The disclosed range estimate has not been adjusted for the applicable geographic differential associated with the location at which the position may be filled.  At Fractal, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.  A reasonable estimate of the current range, based on experience and skills, is: $120,000 - $300,000. In addition, for the current performance period, you may be eligible for a discretionary bonus.

Benefits:

As a full-time employee of the company or as an hourly employee working more than 30 hours per week, you will be eligible to participate in the health, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability plans in accordance with the plan documents, which may be amended from time to time.  You will be eligible for benefits on the first day of employment with the Company.  In addition, you are eligible to participate in the Company 401(k) Plan after 30 days of employment, in accordance with the applicable plan terms.   The Company provides for 11 paid holidays and 12 weeks of Parental Leave. We also follow a “free time” PTO policy, allowing you the flexibility to take time needed for either sick time or vacation.

Fractal provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

If you like wild growth and working with happy, enthusiastic over-achievers, you'll enjoy your career with us!