Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Reducto • San Francisco, CA

30d • Onsite

About The Position

As our founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Reducto, you’ll be at the front lines with our customers—deploying and tuning our systems in real-world environments. You’ll bridge the gap between our core engineering team and the unique, complex needs of our enterprise users. Moreover, you’ll build out the foundation of how this org will grow and expand. Expect to wear many hats: building integrations, debugging gnarly edge cases, optimizing deployment pipelines, and shipping features that materially improve the user experience.

Requirements

• You are your own worst critic. You have a high bar for quality and don’t rest until the job is done right—no settling for 90%. We want someone who ships fast, with high agency, and who doesn't just voice problems but actively jumps in to fix them.
• You have 3 to 6 years of experience deploying software in production settings—ideally with enterprise or regulated customers.
• You're excellent with Python and can navigate Bash and infrastructure as needed.
• You're very comfortable with Kubernetes.
• Tools: Build your own tools as needed—like a quick Streamlit app to test hypotheses or create a dataset.
• Approach: A quantitative approach to building products. Ability to debug, experiment, and iterate fast. You should be comfortable getting hands-on with the full development lifecycle, from ideation to shipping to users.

Nice To Haves

• Have prior experience founding a company or building products at early stages
• Are ambitious and driven, and care a lot about doing great work with great people
• Keep up with the latest developments in ML/AI

Responsibilities

• Deploying and maintaining on-prem and VPC instances of Reducto’s systems, often with complex enterprise constraints (e.g. air-gapped, custom auth, strict latency targets).
• Building tooling to make deployments faster, more reliable, and easier to debug.
• Creating diagnostics, dashboards, and eval harnesses to measure performance and track regressions across environments.
• Writing crisp internal documentation and playbooks for repeatable deployments.
• Collaborating closely with customers, support, and core engineers to identify high-impact improvements.
• Acting as a feedback loop to the product and infra teams—surfacing usability gaps, unmet needs, and opportunities to deepen customer value.
• Working directly with the founders and customers to shape the product direction and engineering strategy

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO: We believe great work requires recharging.
• Lunch: Receive a free lunch to eat with your teammates daily at the office
• Reimbursed Transportation: Provide us with your receipts and we’ll take care of the costs
• Insurance: Generous health insurance covering medical, dental, and vision.
• Health and Wellness Budget: We provide up to $150/mo reimbursement for health and wellness spending, such as gym memberships, fitness classes, or similar.
• Parental Leave: Work with us to build a leave schedule that works for you and your family

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 11-50 employees