Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

GRIDSIGHT • Austin, TX

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

This is a founding role for a Forward Deployed Engineer at Gridsight. The role involves establishing the practical model for this function through hands-on work, collaborating with both GTM teams and customers. Initially, the focus will be on internal customers, including power engineers and the U.S. go-to-market team, to understand their workflows, requirements, and underlying needs. The engineer will then partner with Product and Engineering to ensure the developed tooling solves real problems, acting as the primary field customer. This involves dogfooding the tools on live problems, providing feedback, and iterating until they are useful and trustworthy. Once the tooling is ready, the engineer will lead its rollout across the U.S. team, driving adoption by proving value, supporting users through the transition, setting standards, and measuring success. This role is a senior, hands-on individual contributor position that will help shape the function's operations without inheriting a large team or a pre-defined playbook. It is distinct from conventional product management, pre-sales, or solutions engineering roles, requiring close proximity to customers, power engineering work, data, and code, including building prototypes, integrations, or production-quality software.

Requirements

• Product-minded software engineer with experience building and shipping maintainable software within a product-engineering organization.
• Meaningful power or utility context; experience in power systems, utilities, grid technology, or adjacent critical infrastructure is strongly preferred.
• Deeply hands-on with fluency in Python, SQL, APIs, data pipelines, cloud systems, and modern developer tooling.
• Understanding of modern data and AI workflows, including experience with platforms like Databrates and AI-native developer/agentic tooling.
• Excellent discovery skills: ability to observe actual work, ask revealing questions, and distinguish one-off requests from recurring needs.
• Strong product judgment: ability to translate technical user needs into useful tools and make decisions on building, iterating, simplifying, or stopping.
• Proven ability to drive adoption of new tools or workflows with busy technical teams under live delivery pressure.
• Credibility in complex enterprise environments: clear communication with engineers, utility leaders, and executives, connecting technical work to customer and commercial outcomes.
• High agency, low ego, and sound judgment; ability to work as a peer, take ownership, and create momentum across functional boundaries.
• Willingness to travel regularly and spend meaningful time with customers and the U.S. team, using direct observation as primary engineering input.
• Evidence of ability to build product-quality software, understand power engineers, and make a better way of working real.

Nice To Haves

• Experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, customer-embedded product engineer, or technical lead.

Responsibilities

• Embed with power engineers and go-to-market teams to discover workflows and constraints, identifying high-leverage problems for tooling.
• Act as the first user of new FDE and AI tooling on live work, testing usefulness, correctness, reliability, and fit with critical infrastructure realities.
• Manage the field-product iteration loop by translating evidence into clear requirements, priorities, and acceptance criteria for Product and Engineering.
• Perform hands-on technical execution, including investigating data, writing Python and SQL, building prototypes and integrations, debugging workflows, and assisting with high-priority customer work.
• Lead rollout and adoption of new tools by onboarding the U.S. team, training users, establishing new operating cadences, measuring outcomes, and preventing regression to old methods.
• Define standards and operating discipline for tool usage, AI-assisted work quality, human review requirements, and lesson/failure mode capture.
• Develop compounding leverage by turning recurring field needs into reusable workflows, product capabilities, and playbooks.
• Help leadership define the founding FDE operating model, including engagement criteria, decision rights, handoffs, and success measures.

Benefits

• Opportunity to work directly with founders and leaders.
• Create a uniquely Gridsight FDE model.
• Shape how experts use AI, how tools are built and adopted, and how field learning compounds into the platform.
• Combine software engineering, power systems, product judgment, and change leadership.
• Broad ownership from day one.

What This Job Offers

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