Forward Deployed Software Engineer (AI Agents)

Pallet • San Francisco, CA

6h • $160,000 - $240,000 • Onsite

About The Position

We’re hiring one of our first Forward Deployed Software Engineers to embed directly with customers and deploy production AI agents inside some of the world’s largest logistics companies. You will sit alongside customer engineers and operations teams, reverse engineer legacy systems, design pragmatic integrations, and ship AI workflows into messy, real-world environments.
This is not a research or pure backend role. This is a hands-on deployment role focused on getting systems live, keeping them reliable, and owning real-world outcomes.

Requirements

• 1–5 years of experience shipping and owning production systems in high-growth or early-stage environments
• Strong experience integrating with third-party APIs, authentication systems, and event-driven workflows
• Experience debugging distributed systems in production under real customer constraints
• Comfortable working in ambiguous environments where documentation is incomplete, and requirements evolve during execution

Nice To Haves

• Experience working directly with customers or external stakeholders is a strong plus

Responsibilities

• Reverse engineer undocumented APIs, ERPs, TMS systems, and internal tools with minimal guidance.
• Debug broken data pipelines, mismatched schemas, and flaky integrations in production environments.
• Sit onsite with customer teams (~25% travel) to diagnose failures and ship fixes in real time.
• Make pragmatic tradeoffs to get systems live under tight timelines.
• Own customer go-lives end-to-end — from scoping to production stability.

Benefits

• Impact from Day One: Your first week might involve wiring a new integration into production or debugging a workflow that saves a customer hours. This isn't demo work—it's real implementations
• Ownership & Autonomy: Propose ideas, whiteboard them, ship without layers of approvals. One standup at 10 am PST—primary focus is building, not meetings
• Close-Knit Pods: We sit side by side, so questions get answered in minutes. Small PRs, fast iteration, observability-first
• Culture: Catered lunch daily at 12 pm. Thursday boba runs. AI tools encouraged (Claude, Cursor)—but you must understand the architecture
• Compensation: Salary and equity at 80th percentile, plus bonuses tied to customer go-lives. We promote from within—several teammates earned promotions in under a year

What This Job Offers

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