Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Sylvan Labs • New York City, NY

14h • Onsite

About The Position

Sylvan is building autonomous revenue teams that help B2B companies grow and protect revenue from existing customers. The Founding Forward Deployed Engineer owns customer deployments from initial data access through a working, trusted system. This includes understanding business objectives, constructing the context layer for Sylvan’s agents, building and deploying workflows, improving the agent harness based on observed failures, and demonstrating customer outcomes.

A central part of the role is making customer data usable and trustworthy. Customer data warehouses may be undocumented or contain inconsistent definitions, so the engineer explores schemas, works with customer data and business teams to resolve ambiguity, and verifies the resulting mappings before building on them. The role also develops reusable tooling and validation approaches so that lessons from one deployment improve future deployments.

Sylvan is a fully in-office company based in New York City. The company describes its working style as high-intensity, direct, honest, and grounded in mutual respect. It is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with disabilities throughout the hiring process.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of experience in a technical, customer-facing role such as forward deployed engineering, solutions, or software engineering with substantial customer exposure.
• Strong data warehouse fluency, including SQL and dbt, and the ability to work with undocumented schemas.
• Ability to work with customer data and operations teams to clarify business concepts, reconcile disagreements, and encode agreed definitions.
• Applied data science literacy, including distributions, seasonality, validation design, and calibration, and the ability to recognize when results are noise.
• Attention to detail and persistence in investigating data issues, while ensuring customers can interpret the output.
• Ability to define success metrics and build a case for delivered outcomes.
• Ability to defend technical judgments under pushback and change views in response to evidence rather than authority.
• High tolerance for ambiguity and unglamorous work.
• Based in New York City and excited to work in-office.
• Experience working at the frontier of agent-driven development, including building a customized setup and finding ways to get more out of agents than typical defaults.

Nice To Haves

• Former founder experience is strongly encouraged.

Responsibilities

• Understand customers’ business objectives by working with revenue and operations leaders, identifying the goals behind requests, and deciding what is worth building.
• Onboard customers end to end, including scoping data access, exploring undocumented warehouses, and mapping schemas to business concepts.
• Establish the ontology, interview customer data teams and business owners, resolve inconsistent definitions, and validate mappings before implementation.
• Build customer-facing signals and workflows, along with the agent harness that supports them.
• Diagnose poor outputs and improve the relevant workflow or agent-harness steps.
• Agree on success measures with customers and build evidence-based cases demonstrating whether the work delivered outcomes.
• Be transparent and specific with customers when a success metric does not improve and explain why.
• Create validation frameworks, evaluation harnesses, reusable mapping tools, and other tooling that make subsequent deployments faster.

What This Job Offers

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