Forward Deployed Engineer/Technical Account Manager

Forward Deployed Engineer/Technical Account Manager

About Brightidea

Brightidea is the enterprise innovation management platform behind programs at Coca-Cola, Merck, Nike, and hundreds of other global organizations. We've been at this for 26 years, we're profitable, and we're a ~40-person team — which means small surface area, short decision paths, and a lot of leverage per person.

About the role

This is the role for an engineer who wants to be in the room where the problem is described, not three tickets downstream from it.

You'll sit between our largest customers and our product. When an innovation program lead at a Fortune 500 says "this almost works, but we need X," you're the person who figures out what X really is, decides whether it's a configuration, an integration, a prototype, or a genuine product gap — and then builds the answer. Some of what you build ships to one customer next week. Some of it becomes product.

The other half of the job points inward. Our own teams — sales, customer success, marketing, people ops — have workflows that are held together by spreadsheets and manual steps. You'll take on special projects to automate them, wire up internal tools and AI-assisted workflows, and make a 40-person company operate like a much larger one.

What you'll do

With customers

• Join calls with enterprise customers to scope feature requests, distinguishing the stated ask from the underlying job to be done
• Build solutions directly on the Brightidea platform — configurations, custom integrations, scripts, API work, and prototypes — often within days rather than quarters
• Vibe code with AI to get a working prototype in front of the customer while the conversation is still live, then harden what survives contact with reality
• Turn recurring one-off requests into a case for platform functionality, and work with Product and Engineering to get it built properly
• Own technical escalations and unblock deployments at accounts where the stakes are high
• Write the documentation and handoff that lets Customer Success support what you built without calling you

With internal teams

• Take on special projects from across the company: internal tooling, data pipelines, reporting, AI-assisted workflows, automation of manual processes
• Scope quickly, build pragmatically, and know when a problem deserves a durable system versus a vibe-coded script that saves someone six hours a week
• Partner with our AI lead on where AI genuinely removes work rather than decorating it
• Leave things better instrumented than you found them

What we're looking for

• 8+ years building software in a role where you talked to the people using it — forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, technical consulting, implementation engineering, or a small-company generalist role
• Strong working proficiency in at least one general-purpose language (JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, or similar), plus APIs, webhooks, and SQL
• Real comfort in front of enterprise stakeholders — you can hold a room with a VP of Innovation and a skeptical IT security reviewer in it
• Judgment about scope: you can tell a two-day fix from a two-quarter project and say so honestly, early
• Fluent vibe coder — you build fast with Claude Code, Cursor, or similar, and you have the judgment to know which output is production-ready, which needs a rewrite, and which should never have been generated at all
• Self-direction that holds up in a remote company with limited process — you pick up ambiguous problems and return with something working
• Writing that's clear enough to substitute for a meeting

Helpful, not required: enterprise SaaS experience, SSO/SAML and enterprise security review exposure, innovation management or corporate strategy familiarity, prior time at a company under 100 people.