Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Glean•New York, NY

12d•$160,000 - $270,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Glean is seeking a founding member for its forward-deployed team to operate with the autonomy and accountability of a founder. This role involves discovering and building Glean's next generation of product surfaces, working in a pod with Forward Deployed PMs and directly with the C-suite of influential companies, as well as Glean's engineering and product teams. The position is unique due to Glean's horizontal AI platform, requiring the identification of unsolved business problems at strategic customers, building new products to solve them, and shaping the future of Glean. Successful innovations will be shipped to all Glean customers globally, offering founder-level ownership with Glean's resources and scale.

Requirements

4+ years in technical roles with a track record of shipping production software.
0-to-1 build track record: experience building production software from scratch in ambiguous environments, with a demonstrable product that is now used by real people at scale.
Production AI experience: experience shipping AI-powered solutions in the real world, including prompt engineering, agent development, evaluation frameworks, and deployment at scale.
Full-stack technical depth: strong programming skills across the stack with a deep understanding of and experience with how enterprise systems actually work.
Business acumen: ability to identify real problems within a customer's business and connect that diagnosis to a product hypothesis independently.
Customer instinct: ability to build trust quickly at all organizational levels, communicate with clarity, and tailor technical depth to the audience.
Builder's judgment: ability to assess what is buildable, estimate timelines, and simplify scope to deliver production software faster; ability to spot and solve problems independently.
Curiosity and scrappiness: driven to deeply understand problems before solving them and resourceful in finding paths forward.
Willingness to travel: 25–50% travel required.

Nice To Haves

Experience as a founder.
Experience at a top-tier technology company.
Experience in a forward deployed engineering role.
A technical degree in CS, engineering, math, or a related field.
Deep familiarity with LLMs, retrieval systems, and evaluation frameworks.
Experience driving technology adoption inside large enterprises.

Responsibilities

Discover and build Glean's next product surfaces, focusing on 0-to-1 product creation.
Identify opportunities to extend Glean's platform to solve problems no current product addresses, then design and ship these solutions.
Lead deep opportunity discovery by analyzing business problems, identifying unsolved value, and determining buildable solutions with the fastest path to testing and learning.
Form strong hypotheses with the Forward Deployed Product Manager (FDPM) and pressure-test them directly with stakeholders.
Act as a technical partner to the C-suite, earning trust and clearly explaining technical concepts, benefits, and risks to executives.
Scale successful solutions by working closely with the core R&D team to ensure product scalability.
Collaborate with Glean's core engineering and product teams to stay at the frontier of platform capabilities and influence future development based on field insights.