Forward Deployed Engineer
Raydar
Forward Deployed Engineer
Raydar
AI-powered recruiting agency for tech roles
Raydar · San Francisco, United States · Full-time · Posted 2026-10-12
Salary: USD 220,000–320,000
Workplace: on_site
About the company
Our client is a fast-growing software company.
The role
Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Work as a hands-on engineer embedded with large business customers, owning technical deployment and ongoing success after the sale. Split time between building custom tooling, supporting pre-sales technical evaluations and acting as a bridge between customers and internal product and engineering teams. This is a founding role in a newly created function.
What you'll do
- Support sales colleagues before the sale by running technical evaluations, building demo applications and helping win competitive bake-offs.
- Own technical success for a small set of enterprise accounts, meeting with customers regularly to resolve issues, deepen adoption and open up expansion.
- Build whatever the customer needs, from an evaluation app to a tailored agent or changes to an existing product surface.
- Develop strong relationships with customer stakeholders, especially technical ones.
- Create diagnostics, dashboards and evaluation harnesses to measure performance and catch regressions across environments.
- Relay usability gaps, unmet needs and opportunities back to product and engineering teams.
- Work directly with founders and customers to help shape product direction and engineering strategy.
What we're looking for
- Several years of hands-on experience taking software live in production environments, ideally for customers with demanding or regulated requirements.
- A background at a well-regarded early-stage company, delivering working software to business clients.
- Strong Python proficiency, with the ability to work in Bash and infrastructure as needed.
- Fluency with AI-assisted coding tools and a solid grasp of LLM and machine learning concepts.
- Comfort leading technical discussions on customer calls, with clear and polished communication.
- A quantitative, hands-on approach: able to debug, experiment and iterate quickly across the full development lifecycle.
- A high bar for quality, strong ownership and the agency to step in and fix problems rather than only flag them.
- Willingness to build your own small tools, such as a quick app to test a hypothesis or assemble a dataset.
Bonus points
- Founding experience or early-stage product building.
- Prior experience in a forward-deployed role supporting large customers.
- Ability to design and run evaluations.
- Comfort acting as both a backend-leaning engineer and a customer-facing lead.
- Up-to-date knowledge of developments in ML and AI.
- Degree from a top-tier university.
Compensation and benefits
- Base salary: USD 220,000 to 320,000 per year
- Equity
- Health, dental and vision coverage
- Parental leave
- Flexible time off
- Wellness benefits
Location and work model
- San Francisco, CA, United States
- On-site, 5 days per week in office
- Full-time
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Raydar is an AI-powered talent acquisition firm that serves tech-focused organizations on a contingency basis, charging client companies only after a successful hire. It uses proprietary AI to identify a large pool of candidates and conducts a short 15-minute AI-driven interview (recorded and transcribed) before human recruiters review materials, provide interview prep, and assist with offers and negotiations. What sets it apart is the blend of automated sourcing and screening with hands-on human oversight and tailored client support. Its goal is to help organizations hire more efficiently by speeding up sourcing while maintaining thorough evaluation and negotiation assistance.
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