Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role Own customer deployments from initial data access through delivery of a trusted system with measurable business outcomes. This founding role sits at the intersection of data engineering, applied AI, and customer success, while also building reusable tools and frameworks to improve future deployments. What You'll Do Partner with revenue and operations leaders to understand business objectives and decide what is worth building. Lead customer onboarding, scope data access, and map undocumented warehouse schemas to business concepts. Interview customer data and business teams to establish clear definitions and validate the resulting ontology. Build customer-facing signals and workflows, including the agent setups behind them, and diagnose issues in their outputs. Agree on success measures and develop analysis that demonstrates delivered impact, including clear explanations when outcomes fall short. Turn deployment learnings into reusable validation frameworks, evaluation harnesses, and mapping tools. What We're Looking For At least 3 years of experience in a technical, customer-facing role such as forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, or software engineering with substantial customer exposure. Strong data warehouse skills, including SQL and dbt, and the ability to navigate undocumented schemas. Applied data science and machine learning experience, including statistical or modeling fundamentals and work with distributions, seasonality, validation, and calibration. Experience building custom agent configurations beyond default implementations and improving their outputs. Ability to resolve conflicting business definitions through customer interviews and data validation, and to define success metrics that support credible impact analysis. A degree in statistics, mathematics, computer science, or a comparable quantitative field; experience in early-stage startups or as a founder is valuable. Careful, evidence-driven judgment and comfort with ambiguity, hands-on work, and owning outcomes end to end. Compensation & Benefits Base salary: $180,000 to $250,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available. Location On-site in New York City, United States. Compensation Range: $180K - $250K Originally posted on Himalayas