Forward Deployed Engineer

About Valence

Valence is the AI company behind Nadia, a personalized coach for everyone that advances talent strategy at enterprise scale. Valence’s talent system connects context on individuals, the organization, and the work to embed personalized, proactive development into the day-to-day. Employees build new skills and behaviors, teams work better together, and HR leaders extend the reach and impact of their talent programs, with measurable gains in learning, culture, and performance.

Since launching in early 2023, Nadia has supported millions of coaching conversations in 100+ languages at leading global enterprises, including Delta Air Lines, Coca-Cola, IBM, Schneider Electric, CVS Health, Merck, Kraft Heinz, Telefónica, Prudential, and General Mills. Valence is a Series B company backed by Bessemer Venture Partners and Insight Partners, with offices in New York, Toronto, London, and San Francisco. Learn more at valence.co.

Learn more about our work with Microsoft: Valence Brings AI Coaching More Deeply Into the Flow of Work with Microsoft 365

At Valence, our team is focused on problems that actually decide whether AI changes how organizations operate — the ones with no playbook, no obvious answers, and no guarantee of success. If you want to be part of the small group that defines how AI transforms the future at a global scale, this is your chance.

And this isn’t for everyone. We’re not looking for people who want predictability or incremental progress. We only want those who are restless at the edge of what’s possible, who get bored when things feel “done,” and who are driven to redefine what AI can mean for leaders, companies, and the world. Because at Valence, the work worth doing is the kind that redefines work itself.

The Role

Nadia lives where people already work and connects to the systems that run talent at our customers, such as Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, data lakes and learning platforms. Our customers are some of the largest employers in the world, and each one runs a slightly different stack.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you build customer implementations inside a customer's real environment, using our standard pipes and custom integrations. Once a deal is signed, you take the scope our Sales Engineers wrote and turn it into working integrations. You pull a customer's data out of systems we haven't connected to before, map it cleanly into Nadia and run it in production. You work directly with customer engineers and IT and ship in weeks.

You build what was scoped, and you speak up early when the scope is wrong. When a customer asks for a quick addition, you know it belongs back with the account team. When a one-off keeps coming up, you know it should become a reusable connector.

Our CHRO clients are bringing Nadia deeper into their own technology, including their performance data, talent systems and internal tools. Sales Engineering now scopes that work before signature. We are hiring our founding Forward Deployed Engineers to deliver it, run it, and turn it into the connectors every future customer gets as standard. You will sit in Engineering and work day to day with the account teams on your accounts.

What You'll Do

• Build and ship custom integrations on top of Nadia's standard pipes, connecting new data sources (ServiceNow, Snowflake, custom data lakes, internal APIs, SFTP feeds) to Nadia's context layer.

• Work hands-on with customers' engineers, data owners and IT to get access, agree field mappings and test against real data.

• Own data quality end to end, including identity matching, unit and definition drift, duplicates, late and restated data, terminations and deletions.

• Build privacy and works-council commitments into the code itself with allowlisted fields, per-country rules, least-privilege access and clean deletion.

• Run what you ship. Set up monitoring and alerting, handle incidents, and hand over runbooks so Support can operate it.

• Use AI every day. That means coding agents to build faster, and your LLM knowledge to shape how customer data grounds Nadia's coaching and how we test that it helps.

• Work with core Engineering to turn repeated custom work into reusable connectors and libraries, so the next customer's setup is standard.

• Spot expansion. When a customer's data or workflows point to the next use case, bring it to the account team with a clear technical picture.

What We're Looking For

• 4+ years as a software engineer, including 2+ years building integrations or data pipelines that customers depended on in production.

• Strong Python or TypeScript skills. You write clean, tested code you would be happy for someone else to maintain.

• Hands-on experience with enterprise integration patterns: REST and SOAP APIs, pagination and rate limits, OAuth and service accounts, SFTP and batch file feeds, webhooks, incremental sync and idempotency.

• Good data modeling instincts. You can look at a messy export and spot the identity, unit and duplicate problems before they reach production.

• Experience working directly with customers' technical teams, including telling them kindly when something is out of scope and routing it to the right person.

• Production habits such as logging without leaking sensitive data, retries with backoff, alerting and runbooks.

• AI fluency. You use coding agents every day, and you can explain how an LLM product is given context, grounded and evaluated, and where it fails.

• A privacy and security mindset. You treat employee data as sensitive and know what least privilege, data minimization and data residency mean in code.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Workday, ServiceNow, Snowflake or Databricks APIs and data models.

• Experience with Microsoft Azure, Teams apps or the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

• Experience building eval sets or quality checks for LLM features.

• Experience as a forward deployed, solutions or implementation engineer at a growth-stage company.

• Experience with EU employee-data requirements such as GDPR or works agreements.

What You'll Get

• Ownership & Rapid Growth

• Outsized missions from day one, with direct responsibility for company-defining projects

• Work alongside the executive team with transparency into strategy and decision-making

• Influence on direction through real-time customer feedback and market insights

• AI-First Operator

• Work directly with cutting-edge AI models and next-generation platforms

• Build expertise in enterprise AI implementation across Fortune 500 companies and multiple industries

• Establish yourself as a recognized leader among peers in shaping how AI transforms work at a global scale

• Compensation

• Competitive salary including base + bonuses

• Comprehensive health coverage (medical, dental, vision) from day one

• Generous PTO, company-wide R&R shutdowns, and paid parental leave

• Retirement plan support for US and global employees

• Equity

• Meaningful ownership in a venture-backed company at a growth inflection point

• Financial upside that comes from scaling fast

• Top-up grants as we scale and you deliver exceptional performance — your compensation grows alongside your impact

• Top-Performing Culture

• A culture built for top talent: intensity to win, growth without limits, and a team that solves hard problems and celebrates big wins together

Location and Work Environment

This role is remote in the US. Being able to work from our New York office is a plus.

Employment Verification & Commitment

We use third-party services to verify employment history, education, and other information relevant to your candidacy. Employment is contingent upon the successful completion of these verification checks. This is a full-time role that requires a high level of focus, availability, and commitment. Employees may not hold concurrent full-time employment with another organization while employed at Valence. Any outside consulting, advisory, freelance, or other professional work must be disclosed and approved in advance and must not interfere with job responsibilities, availability, performance, or create a conflict of interest - including risks related to confidentiality, intellectual property, or competition.

Diversity and Inclusion

Valence takes candidate fraud seriously. We verify identity, LinkedIn profiles, employment history, and references; any misrepresentation during the hiring process is grounds for withdrawing an offer or ending employment. All offers are contingent on successful completion of these checks.

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