Software Engineer, Forward Deployed (All Levels)

Zip•San Francisco, CA

4d•$160,000 - $250,000

About The Position

Zip is the AI platform for enterprise procurement — built for humans and agents working together. By orchestrating procurement across teams, tools, and suppliers with the help of AI agents, companies can secure the resources they need to innovate faster than ever before. The world’s most influential enterprises trust Zip, including T-Mobile, OpenAI, AMD, Mars, Dollar Tree, and more. Together they’ve saved over $8 billion and processed over $500 billion in spend. Zip’s team includes product leaders from Apple, Airbnb, and Meta, as well as former procurement leaders from United Health, Sanofi, MGM Resorts, Discover, and NASA. Backed by Adams Street, Alkeon, BOND, CRV, DST, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator, Zip has raised $371 million, most recently at a $2.2 billion valuation and has been recognized by Forbes Fintech 50, Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies, Inc. Best in Business, and LinkedIn Top Startups. You'll join Zip's Forward Deployed Software Engineering team as a software engineer on some of the highest-impact product work at the company. You'll write and ship production code, partner directly with our most critical customers, and own the engineering on the deals that matter most to Zip. The team operates close to the customer, moves with urgency, and builds the features that determine whether the biggest deals close on time, whether our most demanding customers stay on the leading edge of the product, and what enterprise-grade looks like in our platform. If you've done Forward Deployed work elsewhere, this is a place to keep doing it - on real product, at scale, for some of the most recognizable companies in the world.

Requirements

Strong software engineering skills. You've shipped non-trivial production systems and you can read and write code across the stack: Python on the backend and React/TypeScript on the frontend at Zip.
Product instincts and judgment. You're the engineer on your current team who pushes back on poorly scoped requirements, who notices when a feature is solving the wrong problem, and who's willing to say so.
Customer empathy and crisp communication. You can sit in a room with a Director of Procurement at a $50B company, hear what they're actually worried about, and translate it into a tech spec, and vice versa. If you've never done this before but the idea sounds energizing, that counts.
Speed and urgency with a high quality bar. You can move on a customer-driven timeline and still write code that holds up in production.
High ownership. You diagnose, build, and ship with minimal supervision. You're the kind of engineer who follows a problem upstream until it's actually fixed.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience as a product engineer or full-stack engineer on a team that owned features end-to-end, shipped frequently, and worked closely with users or customers.
Prior founder or early-employee experience. Many of the best FDEs are people who want to start a company someday and are using this role to build empathy for what enterprises actually buy and why.
Experience with procurement, finance, ERP, or AP automation systems.

Responsibilities

Lead the engineering on critical customer projects. You'll own scope, sequencing, and delivery against the timelines that high-stakes deals demand, embedded in the implementation cadence alongside our Field PM and Solutions Consultants.
Ship high-impact features that move the most important strategic deals and renewals forward. The work this team takes on is what makes the platform enterprise-grade - net-new product capabilities, framework gaps (APIs, exports, notifications, etc), and targeted enhancements that ship in days or weeks.
Bring strong product sense to every decision. Partner with core product teams to decide what to build, what to push back on, and what to redirect. Strong opinions are welcome; strong opinions grounded in what you heard on a customer call are gold.
Shape Zip's long-term platform and roadmap. Features you ship land at our most critical customers first and compound into the platform, and the patterns you see first become next year's product investments.
Communicate directly with customers. You'll be on calls with procurement, finance, and IT teams, diagnose problems live against real deadlines, and translate trade-offs in language that lands with both engineers and executives.