Forward Deployed Engineer

NegotiateAI • Menlo Park, CA

49d • Hybrid

About The Position

NegotiateAI is building AI for category managers at manufacturing and industrial companies, aiming to streamline indirect spend and deliver significant savings. The company's long-term vision is to create general procurement AI that covers the entire procurement function. Procurement data is often complex and inconsistent across enterprises, with issues like mismatched part numbers, varied supplier names, and customized ERP systems. The platform is designed to function effectively within these real-world data environments from the outset. The Forward Deployed Engineer will be the first in this role, working closely with early customers to ensure the product delivers measurable savings using their actual data. Insights gained from these deployments will be fed back into the core platform. This is fundamentally an engineering role focused on writing production code and owning shipped features, rather than a solutions or consulting position.

Requirements

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience with a proven track record of shipping end-to-end production systems.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively with customers, from problem scoping with category managers to conducting training and answering technical questions from executives.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-based production systems, including agentic workflows, tool use, retrieval, structured outputs, and evaluation.
• Strong backend and integration skills, including API design, data pipelines, and experience working with systems with inaccurate documentation. Depth in engineering is valued over specific language experience.
• Experience handling and processing messy real-world data, including cleaning, normalization, entity resolution, and establishing ground truth.
• Sound judgment in distinguishing between bespoke customer needs and features that should become part of the core product.
• Comfort with ambiguity inherent in an early-stage startup environment, including a small team, shifting priorities, and developing solutions before all specifications are finalized.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites, primarily in manufacturing and industrial sectors, approximately once or twice a month.

Nice To Haves

• Experience integrating with enterprise procurement or ERP systems such as SAP, Ariba, Coupa, Oracle, or NetSuite.
• Background in procurement, supply chain, sourcing, or manufacturing software.
• Deep production experience with TypeScript.
• Experience designing agent harnesses for production reliability.
• Experience with ClickHouse or other columnar analytics stores (e.g., BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks).
• Experience meeting SOC 2, GDPR, or similar compliance requirements in a startup setting.
• Prior experience in roles like Forward Deployed Engineer, Deployment Strategist, Solutions Engineer, or Technical Consultant at companies like Palantir or Scale, or comparable enterprise AI teams.
• Experience at an early-stage startup (Seed through Series B).

Responsibilities

• Embed with customer procurement and IT teams to map spend flows, including intake, approvals, category taxonomies, and supplier master data, identifying areas for savings.
• Define clear success metrics with customers before development, such as realized savings, categorization accuracy, cycle time, and coverage, and instrument them for objective measurement.
• Build integrations into customer systems like SAP, Ariba, Coupa, Oracle, NetSuite, data warehouses, SSO, and SFTP, adapting to read-only or write-back configurations.
• Develop fast pipelines from raw spend extracts to working solutions, including entity resolution for suppliers, part identifier normalization, category mapping, and establishing defensible ground truth.
• Model customer spend in ClickHouse to support analytics and benchmarking, ensuring query performance as datasets grow.
• Customize agentic workflows at the product's core, including retrieval sources, tools, prompts, and guardrails, and ensure their reliability and observability.
• Build per-customer evaluations using their data to prove accuracy, detect regressions, and track progress.
• Drive adoption by conducting training, writing runbooks, and establishing internal champions within customer accounts to avoid becoming a single point of failure.
• Act as the technical representative in sales processes, leading demos, scoping pilots with prospect data, and addressing security, data handling, and compliance questionnaires.
• Incorporate recurring integrations, failure modes, and successful workflows into the core product, rather than maintaining one-off scripts.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed