Forward Deployed Engineer - US

Dryft • San Francisco, CA

7d • Onsite

About The Position

As our Forward Deployed Engineer, you will split your time 50/50 between engineering and customer interaction. This role offers a unique opportunity to learn about becoming a great founder, listener, and builder. You will be responsible for integrating legacy ERP systems, traveling to customer sites, and shipping fixes. You will navigate stakeholders from IT to the C-level, managing complex relationships across Germany, the EU, and the US. Key responsibilities include leading full-stack rollouts, owning implementations end-to-end (scoping, onboarding, integration, training), and designing the product backbone by translating user pain points into product improvements and prototyping features. You will also turn operations into product by creating reusable features, data models, and playbooks, potentially growing into roles like CPO or COO. This is a high-ownership, zero-handholding role for someone who thrives on turning complexity into clarity and delivering working solutions under pressure.

Requirements

• Fast-paced experience – 2+ years in a top-tier role (e.g., consulting), as a founder, or as an early employee in a high-growth startup, with a technical degree or background
• Engineer first – you write production code, understand systems end-to-end, and when something breaks at a customer, you find the root cause
• Product-minded – you listen to rants about ERP, nod wisely, and somehow turn them into product features that feel like magic
• Quality-obsessed – you hold yourself to a high bar, dive deep into problems, and care about getting it right, not just getting it done
• Ultra-professional & detail-obsessed – you earn trust with structure, polish, and docs so clean even a CTO stops asking questions
• Crisis communicator – when things get hard, people look to you; you calm an impatient exec, win over a skeptical IT leader, and still crack a joke in the middle of it
• Down-to-earth & relatable – you bond with shop-floor operators as easily as with boardroom execs, and you'll put on the safety shoes without being asked
• Relocation – you're ready to work onsite in San Francisco (we support visa), with 10 to 30% travel

Nice To Haves

• Industrial background – experience in manufacturing, industrial software, procurement, supply chain or another industrial domain is a plus

Responsibilities

• Lead full-stack rollouts – own implementations end-to-end, from scoping and onboarding to integration and training, and align IT teams, engineers and C-level execs across Germany, the EU and the US
• Design the product backbone – work hands-on with users, translate their pain into product improvements, and prototype features yourself, ideally writing production code when needed
• Turn operations into product – every deployment becomes a blueprint for scale: you turn what you learned into reusable product features, data models and playbooks, and grow into roles like CPO or COO

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level