Forward Deployed Software Engineer

Zensho Agency•San Francisco, CA

18h

About The Position

A seed-stage enterprise AI company deploys AI agents within large organizations across finance, legal, operations, and HR. Forward Deployed Engineers are client-facing builders who take agents from initial client conversations through production, then move to a new enterprise and problem every few months. The role combines substantial customer-facing and hands-on technical work: conducting discovery, gathering requirements, mapping processes, building proofs of concept, and shipping agents for real-world use. It sits between building a demo and operating agents inside a Fortune 500 team, rather than being a pure engineering, strategy, or research role. The position involves 20–40% travel to client sites. The team currently works 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday through Friday, and may move to a Monday-through-Saturday schedule. The company reports 100% month-over-month growth and a team with experience at Meta, AWS Bedrock, Citadel Securities, McKinsey, BCG, and Stanford. Compensation is $160,000–$230,000 plus competitive equity. H-1B visa sponsorship is supported.

Requirements

At least 2 years of experience.
Strong communication, analytical, and engineering abilities, including executive communication, rigorous research, and the ability to quickly learn new domains and workflows.
Comfort writing Python or SQL, working with APIs, and having shipped software or another technical product that people depended on.
Hands-on technical ability to build and ship AI agents and proofs of concept, with a working understanding of how LLMs work.
Experience building with LLMs, including prompts, agents, and evaluations, and informed opinions about what works.
Experience with agentic AI development, guardrails, and evaluation design.
Ability to solve difficult, ambiguous problems for senior stakeholders and deliver results.
Client-facing discovery and process-mapping skills, along with the ability to drive end-user adoption.
Startup mindset, including ownership, urgency, and low ego; comfort with long hours and weekend work.

Nice To Haves

Daily use of AI-native tools such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor.

Responsibilities

Embed with client teams in finance, legal, operations, HR, and IT to understand how work is performed, including exceptions and workarounds.
Conduct client discovery, gather requirements, and map business processes.
Translate ambiguous business problems into agent workflows with success criteria, guardrails, and evaluations.
Build prototypes, proofs of concept, and working AI agents, and ship them for production use.
Train end users and work alongside them to drive adoption.
Present findings and results directly to C-suite stakeholders.
Co-create KPIs with client leadership and measure post-deployment uplift.