Forward Deployed Engineer - New Verticals

Protege

About The Position

We are building Protege to solve the biggest unmet need in AI — getting access to the right training data. The process today is time intensive, incredibly expensive, and often ends in failure. The Protege platform facilitates the secure, efficient, and privacy-centric exchange of AI training data. Solving AI’s data problem is a generational opportunity. We’re backed by world-class investors and already powering partnerships with some of the most ambitious teams in AI. The company that succeeds will be one of the largest in AI — and in tech. We’re a lean, fast-moving, high-trust team of builders who are obsessed with velocity and impact. Our culture is built for people who thrive on ambiguity, own outcomes, and want to shape the future of data and AI. We’re hiring a founding Forward Deployed Engineer to help build a new vertical from the ground up. You’ll be the first FDE dedicated to this vertical, working directly with the GM to define the market, strategy, and early commercial motion. Your job is to turn early customer demand into durable technical capability: defining what the vertical needs, building reusable infrastructure on top of our existing platform, and establishing the technical patterns that future engagements and future hires can build on. This is not a standard implementation role. It sits at the intersection of engineering, product judgment, and customer reality. You should be excited to work from first principles, operate in ambiguity, iterate quickly, and partner with product engineering to make strong calls about what should become a core platform capability versus what should remain vertical-specific.

Requirements

3+ years of engineering experience, including meaningful 0→1 work as a founding engineer, early technical lead, or builder in a highly ambiguous environment.
Strong engineering generalist instincts with a backend and data orientation.
Hands-on experience with Python and SQL.
Comfort working across infrastructure, application logic, and data systems.
Ability to create structure where none exists and move quickly without a fully defined roadmap.
Strong technical judgment, especially around short-term delivery versus long-term architecture.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to work directly with senior technical and business stakeholders.
Ability to independently run technical scoping conversations with customers and translate them into concrete execution plans.

Nice To Haves

Prior founding engineer experience at a successful startup.
Experience extending an existing platform into a new domain or use case.
Track record of turning customer-specific work into reusable internal infrastructure or product capabilities.
Familiarity with ML, NLP, or LLM-based systems.

Responsibilities

Build the first MVP of reusable patterns, integrations, and tooling that future engagements will run on, leveraging our core platform where it fits and extending it where the vertical requires something new.
Make architectural decisions about what belongs in the platform layer versus vertical-specific tooling.
Create the initial technical playbook so future FDEs can build on a real foundation rather than starting from scratch.
Lead the first customer engagements in the vertical, from technical scoping through delivery and post-launch support.
Write robust code that solves immediate customer problems while compounding into reusable infrastructure.
Navigate real-world complexity across customer data, integrations, workflows, and stakeholder dynamics.
Translate messy customer requirements into systems that are durable and maintainable.
Partner with Product and Engineering to identify which patterns from early customer work should become core platform capabilities.
Surface repeatable use cases, infrastructure gaps, and product opportunities from live engagements.
Help determine when the vertical is ready to evolve from bespoke delivery into a repeatable product motion.
Work directly with the GM or Solutions Lead to define the vertical’s technical strategy and commercial approach.
Partner with Data Lab on domain-specific data and research questions.
Collaborate with other FDEs on shared patterns, tools, and approaches that should compound across verticals.
Serve as the technical voice of the vertical as it grows.