Founding Forward-Deployed Engineer
EQL Tech
Founding Forward-Deployed Engineer
EQL Tech
Global AI startup recruitment partner
EQL Tech · Burlingame, United States · Full-time · Posted 2026-07-28
Salary: USD 160,000–245,000
Workplace: on_site
Department: Engineering, Product & Tech
On-site · Engineering, Product & Tech · Full time San Francisco, California, United States
Our client is a stealth, seed-stage startup building an AI-powered wearable platform for industrial field technicians - running a real-time computer-vision and agentic AI system directly on smart-glasses hardware, live today with major data-center, energy, and industrial customers across multiple countries. Backed by a $5M seed round and founded by researchers from Harvard/NASA (computer vision, published at NeurIPS and ICCV) and MIT (machine learning, ex-quant researcher).
The bet: computer vision and agentic vision-language models (VLMs) grounded in real integrations with legacy enterprise systems (ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce) - not another LLM wrapper. The industrial data this generates is also laying the groundwork for robotics automation down the line.
As Founding Forward-Deployed Engineer, you'll embed with large industrial customers (50,000+ employee organizations) and bring the product live on the factory floor - real software engineering plus the last-layer integrations into whatever internal systems the customer runs, not a non-coding "deployment strategist" role.
Based on-site in the SF Bay Area between trips, with roughly 25% domestic travel to customer sites. The founding team lives and works together for the first several months in a shared house before moving to a standard office — expect an intense, in-person, roughly 9-9-6 pace. Hours flex for exceptional, senior talent; the priority is getting the right person, not saving on salary.
Essential
Particularly valuable
How to apply: resume plus a short example of an integration you shipped into a customer's existing systems.
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Eql Tech connects AI-native startups and high-growth tech scale-ups with top talent in engineering, sales, and GTM roles across the US and UK, acting as a strategic talent partner. It offers retained executive search, contingent hiring, and embedded talent solutions, plus interim leadership, talent advisory, and managed services to run a company’s recruitment function. The firm differentiates itself through sector specialization, a multi-service approach, and a leadership team with crosses between finance, education, and AI. Its goal is to help growing tech companies scale by aligning talent strategy with business objectives.
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