Forward Deployed Engineer

career•San Francisco, CA

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

Ayama has partnered with Andrew Ng's AI Fund and a Fortune 500 energy leader to use AI to reshape how $10+ Trillion of heavy assets operate, are managed, and are maintained. With electrification driving rapid growth in energy and reshoring accelerating the build out of U.S. electronics and IT manufacturing, the company plans to close critical gaps by raising asset uptime & output as well as staff productivity. Ayama is looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to be the technical face of Ayama at our customers. The Forward Deployed Engineer is customer-facing every day. You work with customer end users and customer IT teams primarily remotely, with periodic on-site visits to customer operational sites for deeper engagement, training, and incident response. This is a 100% hands-on role split between customer engagement and code. You write Python and SQL daily, debug across systems you didn't build, configure Ayama for each customer's operational reality, and translate field observations back into product decisions.

Requirements

5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience
Daily Python fluency (Django/FastAPI preferred, transferable from Flask or other modern Python frameworks)
Strong SQL: joins, aggregations, window functions, and reading query plans
Track record of customer-facing engineering: deployments, integrations, or incident response with customers in the room
Comfort debugging production issues in code you didn't write
Direct, structured communication: you can write a clear bug report and explain a technical issue to a non-engineer
Cloud experience (GCP preferred) and at least one shipped integration with an enterprise system (ERP, CRM, CMMS, or similar)

Nice To Haves

Prior Forward Deployed Engineer, Implementation Engineer, or Solutions Engineer experience at enterprise or B2B SaaS companies
ERP / CMMS integration experience
Industrial or operations domain background: heavy assets, telemetry, asset management
Background in a physical-engineering discipline (mechanical, electrical, industrial)

Responsibilities

Own customer deployments end-to-end at the technical working level: daily operations, training, configuration, incident triage
Configure Ayama for new customers: enterprise system integrations, operational data mappings, asset hierarchy, customer-specific workflows
Debug customer-affecting issues end-to-end: read logs, trace through pipelines, patch in production, file precise root-cause reports for engineering
Scope and execute pilot deployments as Ayama brings on new customers
Translate field reality into structured product feedback that engineering can act on directly
Build customer-specific scripts, integration adapters, and small tools that don't belong in core product code