Forward Deployed Engineer

Meticulous • San Francisco, CA

6d • $200,000 - $400,000 • Onsite

About The Position

We're building the last piece of the puzzle to help companies unlock AI code generation - the part that makes it actually safe to ship. AI is enabling engineers to write code faster than ever before. But software review and testing hasn't caught up. Engineering leaders are drowning in long review cycles and more bugs than ever. The bottleneck isn't writing code anymore - it's everything that comes after it. We spent 3 years building the foundational technology to crack this - hard to replicate, and several years ahead of anything else on the market. Since then, we've grown 5x year-on-year and now work with some of the most AI-driven engineering teams in the world: Notion, ElevenLabs, Dropbox, Discord, LaunchDarkly, Wiz, CoreWeave, Wealthsimple, and more. Companies like Dropbox, Wiz, and Notion often pay more for Meticulous than any other software product in their stack, and spontaneously refer us to others. We're backed by the same investors behind Twilio, Twitch, Intercom, and PagerDuty. Individual investors include the founders of Vercel, Datadog, Segment, and Dropbox, the CTO of GitHub, the CPO of Adobe, the head of Engineering at Cursor, and many more. Our mission is to radically accelerate the pace of software development by empowering every engineer to ship at the speed their agents write code. This is an opportunity to join a company in hypergrowth as we scale from millions of annual recurring revenue to $100M ARR. If this excites you, come help us build it! The first Forward Deployed Engineer in San Francisco. As Meticulous's first Forward Deployed Engineer in San Francisco, you'll establish our US FDE presence and help define how this function operates from the ground up. The FDE team is still small and the playbook is still being written - you'll be instrumental in shaping the processes, tooling, and best practices that the function runs on as it scales. You'll work directly with engineering leaders at the world's most AI-driven companies, understanding their unique architectures and crafting solutions that work for their specific needs. This role demands an unusual combination of deep technical expertise and entrepreneurial drive, you'll be writing high-performance code one day and presenting architectural decisions to VPs of Engineering the next.

Requirements

• Exceptional engineering skills: Typically 3+ years in a demanding technical role, but we'll consider exceptional candidates with 1+ years of experience.
• Highly agentic: you have a bias to action, move fast, take ownership without being asked, and get genuinely frustrated when things stall - this role demands entrepreneurial self-drive
• Strong communication skills: You can explain complex technical concepts to both engineers and executives, and you're energized by customer collaboration
• Willingness to travel: Approximately 25% travel to customer sites. Expect to spend your first ~2 months in London embedded with the core engineering team.

Nice To Haves

• Senior IC at a top tech company ready to leave the bureaucracy behind and own real customer outcomes end-to-end
• Ex-founder or technical founding engineer who wants to keep the founder-energy but plug into a company with product-market fit and a clear path to scale
• Forward Deployed Engineer at OpenAI, Scale, or Anthropic looking for an earlier-stage version of the same work
• Solutions architect or staff engineer who wants more deep engineering and less PowerPoint

Responsibilities

• Architect and deploy at scale: Work with a customer to understand their full architecture, design implementation strategies that fit their systems, and pair with their engineers to deliver them.
• Evolve the core product to make the customer successful: This can range from debugging and fixing issues that are blocking the rollout (which often go deep into the core technology, such as the deterministic browser), to shipping features that will be transformative for the customer you’re focused on, but also move the product forward itself e.g. rework parts of Meticulous to work at a new level of scale required by the customer.
• Own the technical relationship and lead the pilot: Be the technical lead to engineering leadership (VPs Eng, Staff+ engineers) at each customer - driving scoping, integration, and rollout. A founder or account executive handles pricing and contracts; the two of you operate as a pod per account.
• Guide the direction of the product based on what you learn in the field: As you see how the product performs, and how engineers workflows are rapidly evolving, work out what do we need to build to unlock the next level of automating software development? Where there are improvements which make sense to own and ship, ship them; where the work is larger and needs deeper scoping pair with core engineering team to make them happen.
• Build the playbook: The FDE function is still being defined. You'll be instrumental in establishing the processes, tooling, and best practices that make each deployment smoother and faster than the last, creating the leverage that lets the team scale.

Benefits

• Unlimited food & drinks in office - including daily lunch as a team, and your own Amazon business account to buy whatever snacks you want for the office.
• A setup you’ll love - everyone has a standing desk, brand new Macbook, your choice of ergonomic peripherals, and a $2.5k WFH budget to make home just as good
• Team offsites - we work and play hard, we’ve done offsites in Italy, Abu Dhabi and local 5-star resorts
• Unlimited book budget - we have a growing in-office library and actively encourage everyone to add to it, whether you want to ramp up your knowledge of software testing, or become a better startup operator!

What This Job Offers

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