Forward Deployed Engineer

Loop•San Francisco, CA

126d•$150,000 - $260,000•Onsite

About The Position

Loop is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to work at the edge of the company, embedded with customers to learn their operations, build working solutions, drive client results, and inform Loop’s product direction. The role combines software engineering with product-minded customer discovery and end-to-end ownership, from commercial discovery through technical delivery. It is an engineering position that reports to engineering, rather than professional services or sales engineering, and offers autonomy to help establish an early-stage function whose playbook is still being developed. The role is on-site at least four days per week through customer visits and in-person collaboration at Loop’s San Francisco office. Travel to customer sites is required as needed. The person in this role will qualify opportunities, lead technical discovery, scope projects, integrate customer systems, deliver and iterate on solutions, manage customer relationships and deployment timelines, and feed lessons from deployments into product direction and team processes.

Requirements

3–5 years of software engineering experience.
Hands-on integration experience with enterprise customer systems, such as ERPs, TMS platforms, EDI feeds, payment systems, or comparable legacy environments.
Ability to write production-quality code while navigating legacy systems.
Experience at early-stage or high-growth companies, shipping end-to-end and working across varied responsibilities.
Comfort operating in ambiguous, customer-facing environments with minimal oversight.
Strong communication skills, including translating technical constraints into business language and communicating effectively with operators and executives.

Nice To Haves

Experience owning a full-cycle customer deployment end-to-end, from understanding the problem through shipping a working first version against the customer’s actual systems.
Relevant background such as Forward Deployed Engineer, implementation engineer at a vertical SaaS company, technical founder who handled customer deployments, early-growth field engineer at a developer infrastructure company, or applied AI engineer deploying models into enterprise workflows.
Domain experience in supply chain, logistics, freight, or transportation.
Founder experience or experience leading technical initiatives from zero.

Responsibilities

Qualify opportunities and lead technical discovery by mapping customer systems, assessing technical fit, and producing scoped project plans.
Embed with customers to build and ship working solutions, show early work, iterate on feedback, and deliver a working first version.
Use Loop’s platform primitives where appropriate and build from scratch where needed, prioritizing speed to client results.
Integrate customer systems, including APIs, EDI feeds, ERPs, TMS platforms, and payment systems, and handle underlying data challenges.
Own customer relationships and deployment timelines, including meetings, demos, and status updates from kickoff through commercial conversion.
Travel to customer sites as needed.
Debrief deployments, identify recurring patterns and productization candidates, and route field intelligence into Loop’s product direction.
Help build the function by refining qualification criteria, improving processes, and contributing to the team playbook.