Forward Deployed Engineer

Plain • San Francisco, CA

1d • $180,000 - $250,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Plain is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to own engineering work for strategic customer deployments, from understanding customer problems and designing solutions through implementation and launch. The role helps customers migrate existing support setups and build workflows that are not yet available in Plain, while reducing the impact of bespoke deployment work on the core engineering roadmap. The engineer will also identify which repeated customer needs should become product capabilities rather than one-off solutions.

This is an individual contributor role in an early-stage, ambiguous environment. It involves close customer collaboration and cross-functional work with Sales, CX, Product, and core Engineering. The role is hybrid, with three days a week in Plain’s San Francisco office. Because the team works closely with colleagues in Europe, the workday starts early, with quiet afternoons available for focused work.

Requirements

• Experience building and shipping full-stack products end to end.
• Proficiency with modern frontend development, including React and TypeScript.
• Ability to write backend software that holds up in production.
• Ability to prototype quickly and learn from real customer usage.
• Excellent communication skills, including running customer calls, converting vague requests into concrete scope, and documenting agreements.
• Strong product sense and judgment about customer needs, one-off work, and whether a feature is worth building.
• Ability to own outcomes and work independently in an ambiguous environment without waiting for detailed requirements.
• Ability to remain calm during delays, bugs, and scope discussions, and to push back appropriately on unreasonable requests.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers to diagnose problems, scope fixes, and ship solutions end to end.
• Own system design for customer deployments, balancing correctness, scale, and speed.
• Explain plans and tradeoffs clearly to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Work with Sales, CX, Product, and core Engineering to incorporate customer learnings into the product roadmap.
• Help define how the Forward Deployed function operates as it grows.
• Determine which customer-specific work should become product capabilities and which should remain bespoke.

What This Job Offers

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