Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Manifold AI•Cambridge, MA

About The Position

Manifold is hiring Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) to work at the intersection of AI, data infrastructure, and life sciences. Our customers are working on life changing medicines that affect real patients, and the faster their data becomes usable, the faster the science moves. In this high-impact role, you will work directly with scientists and clinicians across biopharma, academic research, and health systems to put Manifold's platform to work with their data, from scoping through to production. As an FDE, you'll be the primary technical and scientific contact for your accounts. An Implementation Manager owns the customer relationship, and you own the technical and scientific work inside it. You'll work as one team for our customers alongside Implementation, Product, and Account Management. You'll field questions about the whole platform, including parts you didn't build, and you'll often be the only Manifold person on the call. We expect our FDEs to operate autonomously, thrive under ambiguity, and represent Manifold at the highest level in customer environments, which means earning our customer’s trust in the first conversation and owning the path to a successful outcome.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in a technical customer-facing role, or equivalent demonstrated impact, with deep expertise in at least one of the areas listed below (by "deep," we mean you've owned it in production) and working knowledge of several others
Scientific or clinical fluency; you can hold a peer-level conversation with a researcher about their work
A genuine interest in the science and in what our customers are trying to cure or understand. You care about the outcome, not just the technology.
You've shipped Python and SQL into production, and can point to systems you built that are still running
You've built AI into how you work. You use Claude Code, Cursor, or similar agentic tools, and have concrete examples of work you now take on that you couldn't before or would have handed off
You execute with velocity and have shipped working solutions into complex, real-world environments quickly, and you can explain your decision making along the way
Able to lead customer conversations on your own, with stakeholders from bench scientists to C-suite executives
High agency with a bias towards speed, pragmatism, and ownership, and good judgment about when to build and when not to
You raise the bar, make the people and systems around you better, and you leave behind patterns others adopt
You're hungry to grow and have an appetite to learn something new on every engagement, and this part of your work is energizing for you
Bachelor's degree or higher in a computational, engineering, life science, or clinical field, or equivalent experience
Willing to travel to customer sites as needed, which is currently ~10% travel

Nice To Haves

Life science and clinical research, including clinical data (bench, translational, or clinical research; EHR structures, trial and registry data, OMOP, ICD, SNOMED)
Bioinformatics and genomics, such as analysis pipelines, genomic file formats, reference data
Data engineering and modeling, inclusive of ingestion and orchestration with Airflow, dbt, Snowflake, and production ELT; schema design, data quality, validation
Cloud infrastructure and software development covering areas like AWS, infrastructure as code, deploying into customer-controlled accounts; backend APIs, third-party integrations, large shared codebases; frontend in React or equivalent
AI agents and evaluation inclusive of agent configuration, prompting, checking whether outputs are correct
Regulated data environments such as HIPAA, IRB constraints, clinical data governance

Responsibilities

Scope and architect end-to-end solutions on Manifold's platform, and recommend whether a problem needs configuration, a custom build, or a self-service path
Configure and implement the platform for each customer, and build what it needs alongside: data pipelines, agent configuration, process automation, and domain-specific tooling
Own delivery from onboarding and pilot through to production, working in the customer's environment with their data, and quickly drive the engagement from ambiguous problem to working in production
Run discovery sessions, demos, and end-user training, and support adoption after go-live
Troubleshoot complex issues across infrastructure, data, and application layers
Identify repeatable patterns, playbooks, and tooling that accelerate future deployments, and help set the standard for what a great deployment looks like
Work closely with Product and GTM teams, and feed what you learn from customers back into the product roadmap
Raise the bar for the team: share what works, document what you learn, and help the next FDE start further ahead than you did