Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Denari•Madison, WI

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Denari is building the modern software stack for accounting firms, an AI-powered platform that unifies client collaboration, document management, workflow automation, and financial insights. This role is for Denari's first Forward Deployed Engineer, responsible for turning real partner problems into working solutions. The engineer will work directly with accounting firms to understand their operations, identify high-value problems, and rapidly build, configure, and deploy solutions using the Denari platform. This may involve creating agent skills, configuring document schemas, designing workflows, improving the core product, or building lightweight applications. This is not a traditional software engineering role, and formal experience is not required. The focus is on being a technically confident, resourceful builder who can use agentic development tools to solve business problems, thinking like an engineer by breaking down ambiguity, understanding systems, testing work, and owning outcomes. The objective is to understand needs, find pragmatic solutions, deliver them, and demonstrate value. As the founding FDE, this role will also help define the function itself, including scoping, prioritization, outcome measurement, deployment monitoring, turning one-off work into reusable capabilities, and feeding learnings back into the product. The role reports directly to Denari's CEO.

Requirements

Exceptional communication skills and the ability to build trust with partners.
The curiosity and judgment to turn ambiguous business problems into concrete technical solutions.
Strong ownership, self-direction, and comfort operating without a predefined playbook.
A pragmatic mindset: you know when to configure, when to automate, when to build, and when the problem doesn’t require software at all.
Confidence working across a broad range of systems, tools, and problem types.
Substantial experience using AI agents in your day-to-day work.
Experience using agentic development tools such as Claude Code to build useful applications, automations, or internal tools.
The ability to measure outcomes and explain the value of what you delivered.
Comfort working directly with customers and maintaining a high standard of responsiveness and professionalism.
Clear, honest, upfront communication.
Formal software engineering education or professional software engineering experience is not required. You may come from solutions engineering, implementation, technical consulting, operations, product, accounting technology, or another hands-on customer-facing role. We care about your ability to understand problems, work effectively with technical systems, use modern agentic tools, and deliver reliable outcomes.
You might be especially well suited to this role if you have worked as a Technical Solutions Engineer in a complex software environment and have since become highly effective at building with AI development tools.

Nice To Haves

You listen closely enough to uncover the real problem behind the initial request.
You take ownership from the first conversation through deployment, measurement, and ongoing support.
You choose the simplest approach that creates meaningful value.
You can build something scrappy today while recognizing what would need to change for it to scale tomorrow.
You try a new tool or approach on a Friday and demo it on Monday.
You communicate early and directly when priorities, constraints, or expectations need to change.
You treat service as part of the product and make partners feel that their problems matter.
You disagree with us and say so because you care about getting it right.
You move confidently across unfamiliar systems without needing to be an expert in all of them first.
You want requirements to be fully defined before you begin.
You prefer to specialize deeply in one area rather than move between partners, workflows, agents, integrations, and product problems.
You see customer conversations or ongoing support as distractions from the “real” work.
You optimize for technical elegance even when a simpler solution would create value sooner.
You enjoy prototyping but lose interest in deployment, measurement, documentation, or maintenance.

Responsibilities

Work directly with partners to understand their operations, uncover problems, and identify opportunities where Denari can create measurable value.
Design, build, configure, deploy, and maintain solutions within the Denari platform.
Develop and customize agent skills and workflows in Denari Answers.
Configure document schemas, user workflows, and automations across the Denari platform.
Use agentic coding tools to build integrations, internal automations, prototypes, and lightweight sidecar applications when the platform alone isn’t the right answer.
Make targeted contributions to Denari’s core product when a small change can unlock meaningful partner value, with support from our engineering team where needed.
Define success measures before deployment and demonstrate the operational or financial value created afterward.
Monitor deployed solutions, respond when something breaks, and improve their reliability over time.
Turn repeated partner needs into reusable skills, patterns, tooling, and product recommendations.
Communicate partner feedback and field observations clearly to product, engineering, and company leadership.
Help other Denari teams move faster, including developing automations and tools for our partnerships team.
Establish the playbooks, standards, and operating rhythms that future Forward Deployed Engineers will inherit.