Forward Deployed Engineer

Applied Intuition, Inc. is powering the future of physical AI. Founded in 2017 and now valued at $15 billion, the Silicon Valley company is creating the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet. Applied Intuition services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries in three core areas: tools and infrastructure, operating systems, and autonomy. Eighteen of the top 20 global automakers, as well as the United States military and its allies, trust the company’s solutions to deliver physical intelligence. Applied Intuition is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Washington, D.C.; San Diego; Ft. Walton Beach, Florida; Ann Arbor, Michigan; London; Stuttgart; Munich; Stockholm; Bangalore; Seoul; and Tokyo. Learn more at applied.co.

We are an in-office company, and our expectation is that full-time employees primarily work from their Applied Intuition office 5 days a week. However, we also recognize the importance of flexibility and trust our employees to manage their schedules responsibly. This may include occasional remote work, starting the day with morning meetings from home before heading to the office, or leaving earlier when needed to accommodate family commitments. This in-office expectation does not apply to contractor positions

About the role: 

Applied Intuition is building a new Forward Deployed Engineering team in Munich — the first of its kind in our EMEA organization. As a founding FDE, you won't just fill a role: you'll help define what great looks like for this function.

FDEs are our most technical, highest-ownership engineers embedded directly inside our most strategic customers — tier-1 automotive OEMs and suppliers across the EMEA region and beyond. You operate at the intersection of core product engineering and customer delivery: you write and ship net-new features, build standalone applications, and solve the hardest technical problems that exist at the boundary between Applied's platform and the customer's environment.

This is not a support or customer success role. You spend the majority of your time building — coding production-quality software, designing system architectures, and delivering working products inside customer environments. You bring field signals back to Applied's product and engineering teams, directly shaping the roadmap.

At Applied Intuition, you will:

• Own end-to-end delivery: from initial problem framing and technical scoping through architecture, implementation, and production rollout inside customer environments.

• Ship production software: build net-new features, standalone applications, and integrations that solve real customer problems (examples: scenario tooling, data pipeline applications, evaluation frameworks, custom simulation workflows).

• Embedded with customers: work side-by-side with customer engineering and domain teams at their sites; understand their technical constraints, debug complex issues, and ensure successful outcomes.

• Bridge the product gap: identify where Applied's platform falls short of customer needs, build custom solutions that fill those gaps, and feed concrete requirements back to product and engineering.

• Set the bar: as a founding member, codify deployment patterns, build internal playbooks, and help shape how the FDE function operates across EMEA.

• Travel regularly: expected 25–40% on-site at customer locations across Germany and EMEA.

What we're looking for:

Must have: 

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of shipping production code

• Full-stack development skills — comfortable across backend, API layer, and frontend as needed

•  Experience working directly with customers in high-stakes, technical environments (FDE, embedded engineering, deep technical consulting, or customer-facing SWE roles)

• Ability to operate autonomously in ambiguous situations — you define the path forward, you don't wait for one

• Strong English communication skills; ability to engage confidently with both engineers and senior stakeholders

Strongly preferred:

• Experience at a company known for forward-deployed or embedded engineering models 

• Background building internal tools or custom applications that live inside customer infrastructure

Nice to have:

• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)

• Prior work at an early-stage team where you helped define processes from scratch

Benefits:

• 30 days of paid vacation per year

• Daily meal benefits: €19 lunch budget and €19 dinner budget, free breakfast, snacks, and drinks in the office

• You’ll receive €965 annual learning & development and €580 annual fitness budget

• Subsidized Wellpass membership, giving you access to thousands of gyms, studios, and wellness facilities across Germany

• €25 monthly contribution to your Deutschlandticket for regional public transport across Germany

• Generous parental leave: on top of statutory parental leave

Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Applied Intuition is an equal opportunity employer and federal contractor or subcontractor. Consequently, the parties agree that, as applicable, they will abide by the requirements of 41 CFR 60-1.4(a), 41 CFR 60-300.5(a) and 41 CFR 60-741.5(a) and that these laws are incorporated herein by reference. These regulations prohibit discrimination against qualified individuals based on their status as protected veterans or individuals with disabilities, and prohibit discrimination against all individuals based on their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin. These regulations require that covered prime contractors and subcontractors take affirmative action to employ and advance in employment individuals without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status or disability. The parties also agree that, as applicable, they will abide by the requirements of Executive Order 13496 (29 CFR Part 471, Appendix A to Subpart A), relating to the notice of employee rights under federal labor laws.

FOR US-BASED ROLES: Applied Intuition is committed to providing an accessible and inclusive application and interview experience to applicants who are disabled veterans and other applicants with disabilities or medical conditions. Reasonable accommodations are available, requesting an accommodation will not affect your candidacy in any way, and you are not required to disclose the nature of your disability or medical condition in order to make a request. If you require an accommodation please contact [email protected]. We will work with you!