Forward Deployed Engineer

NegotiateAI•Menlo Park, CA

47d•Hybrid

About The Position

NegotiateAI is building AI for category managers at manufacturing and industrial companies to streamline indirect spend and deliver significant savings. The company's long-term vision is to expand into general procurement AI across the entire function. This role is for the first Forward Deployed Engineer, who will be embedded with early customers. The primary focus is on building solutions using real customer data to deliver measurable savings, and then feeding insights back into the core platform. This is an engineering role requiring the candidate to write and own production code.

Requirements

4+ years of professional software engineering experience with a track record of shipping production systems end-to-end.
Comfort working directly with customers, from problem scoping to training and answering technical questions from executives.
Hands-on experience building LLM-powered production systems, including agentic workflows, tool use, retrieval, structured outputs, and evaluation.
Strong backend and integration skills, including API design, data pipelines, and working with systems with potentially inaccurate documentation.
Experience shipping solutions against messy real-world data, including cleaning, normalization, entity resolution, and establishing ground truth.
Judgment to differentiate between bespoke customer solutions and product features.
Comfort with early-stage ambiguity, shifting priorities, and shipping features before full specification.
Willingness to travel to customer sites approximately once or twice a month.

Nice To Haves

Experience integrating with enterprise procurement or ERP systems (SAP, Ariba, Coupa, Oracle, 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 (BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks).
Experience meeting SOC 2, GDPR, or similar compliance requirements at a startup.
Prior forward deployed, deployment strategist, solutions engineering, or technical consulting experience at companies like Palantir or Scale.
Experience at an early-stage startup (seed through Series B).

Responsibilities

Embed with customer procurement and IT teams to understand spend flow, including intake, approvals, category taxonomies, supplier master data, and identify savings opportunities.
Define clear success metrics with customers before development, such as realized savings, categorization accuracy, cycle time, and coverage, and instrument them for measurement.
Build integrations with customer systems like SAP, Ariba, Coupa, Oracle, NetSuite, data warehouses, SSO, and SFTP.
Navigate different data access postures (read-only vs. write-back) and design integrations accordingly.
Develop efficient pipelines from raw spend extracts to working solutions, including entity resolution for suppliers, part identifier normalization, category mapping, and defensible ground truth.
Model customer spend in ClickHouse, optimizing query performance as datasets grow.
Customize agentic workflows at the core of the product, including retrieval sources, tools, prompts, and guardrails, ensuring reliability and observability.
Build per-customer evaluations against their data to prove accuracy, catch regressions, and track progress.
Drive customer adoption through training, runbooks, and empowering internal champions.
Act as the technical point of contact for prospects, leading demos, scoping pilots, and handling security and data handling inquiries.
Identify recurring patterns in integrations, failure modes, and workflows to inform product development, moving beyond one-off scripts.
Generalize deliberately, knowing when to hardcode for immediate customer needs and when to build abstractions for broader platform improvement.