Forward Deployed Engineer (US)

About Us

Cekura (YC F24) is one of the fastest-growing companies in its batch, with strong revenue traction. We’re well-funded, backed by premier investors, and have years of runway.

We’re building the reliability layer for Conversational Agents. Teams use Cekura to simulate and monitor their AI agents end-to-end - measuring latency, barge-in, instruction-following, regressions, and more across phone, chat, SMS, and web. Customers love the product - and we’re just getting started.

About the Role

You’re joining at an inflection point. As Forward Deployed Engineer, you’ll build the playbooks, processes, and relationships that define how Cekura partners with technical customers for long-term success. You’ll be both strategist and hands-on operator.

What You’ll Do

• Own onboarding end-to-end: Seamless handoffs from Sales; define success criteria, timelines, and milestones; instrument adoption and time-to-value.
• Be a trusted technical advisor: Guide customers on integrating Cekura into CI/CD and production stacks (APIs, webhooks, auth, SIP/Twilio flows, STT/TTS, LLM configs).
• Drive product feedback: Partner with Engineering & Product; submit crisp RFCs backed by usage data to influence the roadmap.
• Proactive account management: Monitor health, predict risk, and execute save/expansion plays based on telemetry.
• Hands-on problem solving: Reproduce issues, triage with engineering, and close the loop with clear comms.
• Executive storytelling: Quantify ROI (quality, reliability, speed); craft references and case studies.
• Foundational leadership: Help hire and mentor the future FDE team; set standards as we scale.

About You

• Customer-obsessed: You care deeply about measurable outcomes and long-term partnerships.
• Technical pedigree (dev-tool savvy): You can read API docs, inspect payloads, and reason about systems. You’ve used Postman/cURL; you’re comfortable with logs/dashboards and basic scripting.
• Clear communicator: You distill complex concepts for execs and engineers alike.
• Builder’s mindset: You thrive in zero-to-one, create structure from ambiguity, and bias to action.
• Analytical: You ground decisions in data - usage, adoption, performance, and business impact.

Minimum Qualifications

• 2 years in a technical role at a developer-focused or infra/SaaS company.
• Comfort with APIs, webhooks, basic SQL, and one of Python/JS (to prototype, parse logs, or write examples).

Nice to Have

• Early/founding FDE or first FDE hire experience (you built the playbook).
• Familiarity with at least one of: LLM/AI agent tooling, observability/testing

This Might Not Be for You If

• You need rigid processes or heavy structure.
• You prefer pure relationship management without technical depth.
• You don’t enjoy fast-paced, in-person startup environments (we’re in SF, 6 days/week).

Why Cekura

• Responsibility & scope: Shape the foundation of our FDE org.
• Exceptional team: Work directly with founders and a highly technical, product-driven group.
• Impact: Improve the reliability of AI agents used by real customers every day.
• Upside: Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and rapid growth.
• Benefits: Medical/dental/vision, team lunches and dinner!

Excited to help world-class teams ship reliable AI agents - and wear both the customer and engineer hats? Let’s talk.