Forward Deployed Engineer

Harper•Denver, CO

92d•$150,000 - $200,000•Remote

About The Position

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), you will embed with customers and partners to build, deploy, and earn the technical trust necessary to secure and grow enterprise deals. This is a remote role with low travel requirements and high ownership. The ideal candidate will possess the ability to build solutions, understand enterprise operations, and engage with C-level executives as an equal. With extensive experience in the enterprise sector, potentially in leadership or customer-facing roles, you will return to hands-on work, focusing on code, customer interaction, and leveraging AI tools for rapid development. FDEs are Harper's most trusted field representatives, acting as highly technical, customer-facing engineers who drive adoption and outcomes, serving as trusted advisors during the sales process. This role demands deep enterprise experience and a consulting mindset, requiring you to build, deploy, and troubleshoot within customer environments. You will communicate effectively with enterprise buyers, understanding their challenges from their perspective, and utilize modern AI tooling daily to accelerate your work and guide customers on AI integration. Harper values authenticity and the ability to address customer problems directly over specific framework expertise. The role involves wearing multiple hats and adapting to new challenges, with an emphasis on creating solutions rather than following a predefined playbook. Unlike many similar roles, this position is remote and does not require extensive travel. It offers an opportunity to move away from corporate structures and engage directly with code and customers, applying your experience where it matters most.

Requirements

Deep enterprise experience with a consulting mindset (top priority). 8–10+ years of real-world experience, often including team or senior leadership. You've owned client outcomes, navigated ambiguity, and can speak to enterprise buyers with the authenticity of someone who has been in their chair.
Genuinely customer-facing. You want to be on customer calls, lead the conversation, and do presales work—not just build behind the scenes.
A hands-on development background (language-agnostic). You can build, script, and validate solutions and get into the terminal. You do not need prior Node.js experience—if you have a solid development foundation and the experience we're after, we'll teach you our stack.
Platform-first instincts. You appreciate opinionated platforms and lean into what they do well, rather than reflexively rebuilding from scratch.
Fluency with AI coding assistants and a working understanding of modern AI concepts (LLMs, RAG, embeddings, agents, and workflows), with the ability to apply them in real technical work.
Comfort with ambiguity and ownership. You thrive in fast-moving, early-stage environments and hold yourself accountable for outcomes rather than tickets.
Excellent communication skills. You can build trust with, and translate between, technical practitioners and business leaders.
Willingness to participate in on-call rotations to support platform reliability.

Nice To Haves

Prior leadership or senior individual-contributor experience in an enterprise environment.
Experience enabling and co-delivering with system integrators, channel, or technology partners.
Hands-on experience with distributed systems, databases, APIs, and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
Experience with Harper or developer-focused / data infrastructure products.
Exposure to Node.js is a nice-to-have, not a requirement.
Familiarity with, or general understanding of, web performance and core web vitals.

Responsibilities

Partner closely with customers to understand technical requirements, business objectives, and operational constraints.
Build, configure, customize, integrate, and deploy Harper's platform to meet unique customer workflows—directly within customer environments.
Troubleshoot and resolve systems, data, integration, and operational issues during deployment and after go-live.
Own customer outcomes end-to-end, working independently in ambiguous, fast-moving environments while staying aligned with internal teams and partners.
Get in the room with enterprise buyers—leading technical discussions with developers, architects, and executive sponsors with the authenticity of someone who has sat in their seat.
Support the sales cycle: run discovery, shape technical direction, and help prove Harper's value to technical and executive stakeholders.
Take the lead in conversations and reframe when a proposed approach doesn't fit Harper's platform strategy—leaning into what the platform does and why it's the right call.
Act as a trusted technical advisor throughout the relationship, guiding customers on scalability, reliability, performance, security, and long-term operations.
Write and ship production-quality code, scripts, APIs, and automation to extend Harper's capabilities on behalf of customers.
Prototype custom functionality and deliver field-ready solutions that address immediate customer needs, validated in real customer environments.
Lean into Harper's opinionated, platform-first model—using what the platform provides rather than rebuilding it from scratch—so customers get up and running fast.
Collaborate with product and engineering to ensure custom solutions align with long-term platform direction.
Enable and upskill system integrators and technology partners to deliver Harper solutions independently and at scale.
Co-deliver strategic engagements alongside partners, providing deep technical guidance and quality assurance.
Build reusable delivery assets, reference architectures, and best practices that expand partner-led delivery capacity.
Serve as the customer's voice inside Harper—gathering field insights, surfacing real-world gaps and customer patterns, and bringing them to Product and Engineering with evidence and a clear point of view.
Partner with Sales, Professional Services, and Customer Success across the customer lifecycle, and hand off cleanly for a smooth path to production.
Participate in post-engagement reviews, capture lessons learned, and mentor peers to raise the delivery bar across the team.
Participate in on-call rotations to support platform reliability and availability.
Provide engineering expertise during incidents and escalations, troubleshooting platform and infrastructure issues to minimize customer impact.
Use AI coding assistants fluently (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) to build, deploy, and troubleshoot faster—prompting effectively, reviewing generated code critically, and knowing when to trust versus verify output.
Apply agentic and automation workflows to accelerate repetitive engineering, integration, and enablement tasks.
Decompose ambiguous, open-ended technical problems and use AI as a force multiplier for research, design, and debugging—paired with sound engineering judgment.
Rapidly get up to speed on unfamiliar systems, codebases, and customer domains by combining AI-assisted exploration with hands-on validation.
Hold a solid working understanding of modern AI concepts—LLMs, embeddings, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector search, context windows, tokens, agents, and tool use—and their practical trade-offs.
Reason credibly with customers about model capabilities, limitations, cost/latency trade-offs, and how AI patterns integrate with Harper's data and platform architecture.