Forward Deployed Engineer

Wise Pelican•Scottsdale, AZ

4d•$100,000 - $150,000•Onsite

About The Position

Wise Pelican is hiring its first Forward Deployed Engineer. This role is for a builder who loves thinking about product and has the catch phrase, “I can fix that.” You’ll take ideas, especially around AI and our real estate marketing product, and turn them into things that make a tangible impact on our clients’ real world work. This means shipping code, talking to customers, untangling messy workflows, and owning the last 10% that makes or breaks our product. As a bootstrapped company, everything we build matters, impacting revenue, client retention, and internal ease-of-use. This is a full-time, onsite position located in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Requirements

Strong software engineering foundation and evidence of shipping real, working software beyond coursework, tutorials, or prototypes that have never met a paying user.
Comfortable building production applications with Python, TypeScript, and React.
Understanding of full-stack development fundamentals, including APIs, databases, testing, debugging, deployment, authentication, and cloud-based systems.
Ability to independently work through technical problems and know when to ask for context, support, or a second opinion.
Ability to speak with customers, executives, developers, and nontechnical stakeholders without requiring everyone else to learn your language first.
Communicate progress, tradeoffs, risks, and changing expectations before they become surprises.
Enjoy understanding how a business works and can connect technical decisions to revenue, adoption, efficiency, risk, and customer outcomes.
Comfortable beginning with an unclear problem, asking direct questions, organizing the moving pieces, and creating a reasonable path forward.
Thoughtful use of numerous AI development tools.
Desire to build and deliver, not recommend what someone else should build.

Nice To Haves

Experience building or deploying production systems involving LLMs, AI agents, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluations, guardrails, or human-in-the-loop workflows.
Experience working directly with customers through implementation, solutions engineering, technical consulting, product development, or a similar role.
Experience inside an early-stage or bootstrapped company where you had to operate without layers of process, specialized teams, or unlimited resources.
Experience with marketing automation, CRMs, HubSpot, real estate technology, workflow automation, or data-heavy SaaS products.
Ability to show a project where you identified the problem, built the solution, launched it, and learned whether it actually worked.

Responsibilities

Partner with the CEO and cross-functional leaders to identify product and AI opportunities tied to revenue, customer success, efficiency, or long-term company value.
Work directly with customers and internal teams to understand their workflows, uncover the actual problem, and translate ambiguous business needs into a clear technical plan.
Build full-stack solutions using Python, TypeScript, and React, including product features, internal tools, integrations, data workflows, and AI-supported applications.
Own projects from discovery and prototyping through testing, production deployment, adoption, and ongoing improvement.
Define what success should look like before development begins and measure whether the finished solution creates the intended business or customer outcome.
Make practical decisions about scope, speed, maintainability, security, and technical quality so projects move forward without creating avoidable messes behind them.
Turn successful customer-specific or internal solutions into reusable components, documented playbooks, and scalable product capabilities.
Bring lessons from customers and real-world deployments back to the broader product roadmap.
Keep stakeholders informed, surface risks early, and create enough structure to prevent important work from getting lost between departments.