Lead Forward Deployed Engineer

4M • Austin, TX

20h • Hybrid

About The Position

4M Analytics is hiring its founding Forward Deployed Engineer in the US for the Utility Owners Business Unit. The role works at the intersection of engineering, product, and customers, in close day-to-day partnership with a Product counterpart. It involves taking ambiguous operational problems from the field, building and deploying software to solve them, and translating what is learned into scalable product capabilities.

The engineer will lead development of a platform that helps utility owners manage the locate-request and damage-prevention lifecycle, including intake, classification, routing, field coordination, service levels, escalations, auditability, analytics, and AI-assisted workflows. As the product and business scale, the role will help grow a US engineering team and may expand into broader product or AI-strategy ownership.

The position requires close collaboration with the R&D organization in Israel, regular work with customers and field sites, and ownership of complex enterprise integrations. The company prefers a hybrid schedule of three days per week in its Austin, Texas office, but will consider US-based fully remote candidates who can travel regularly to Austin. Regular travel to customer and field sites and several trips each year to the R&D center in Israel are expected.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software development experience, with a track record of shipping across the stack.
• Demonstrated success personally building and deploying systems in ambiguous, customer-facing environments.
• Leadership experience, such as mentoring, setting technical direction, or running a small team.
• Strong fundamentals in data and databases, cloud and distributed systems, security and authentication, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Ability to learn unfamiliar systems quickly and make them work in the field.
• Fluency with AI coding, agentic flows, and modern development practices.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and the discipline to collaborate effectively with a remote team.
• Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to remain effective in it.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with geospatial and GIS fields.
• Experience with IoT, mobile, or field hardware.
• Experience with utility, energy, transportation, AEC, or industrial software.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship production-quality software in response to real customer problems; prototype, validate in the field, and harden solutions.
• Spend time at customer and job sites, working alongside field crews, operations teams, and physical devices.
• Own complex integrations with enterprise APIs, utility GIS, national field-technology platforms, and industry ticketing networks.
• Distinguish one-off customer requests from reusable platform capabilities and partner with core engineering to make field-proven solutions scalable.
• Set priorities, manage time, and make architecture decisions in the absence of a finished specification.
• Mentor engineers and help grow the US engineering team as the product scales.
• Collaborate closely with the Israel-based R&D organization across time zones, providing clear updates and maintaining shared standards.

What This Job Offers

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