Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

About Justworks

Justworks helps U.S. small businesses run payroll, benefits, HR, and compliance in one platform. Justworks International extends that globally, giving 12,000+ U.S. SMBs a single partner to hire and pay people in 40+ countries through our Employer of Record (EOR) and international contractor products, and take care of teams through market leading benefits solutions. We're growing fast, and we’re re-designing how we work AI-first to empower teams to do their best work and build more valuable solutions for our customers and their teams around the world.

About the role

Every enterprise will soon need teams who figure out where AI agents can drive leverage inside a team, redesign workflows around it, wire up the systems, and run the agents in production. This role is that person for Justworks International.

EOR is a dense set of workflows running on structured compliance data, customer data, and tribal knowledge. Almost every team - Ops, CS, Finance, Legal - has workflows where agents could process orders of magnitude more volume, compress cycle times from days to minutes, and free humans for the judgment-heavy work. We need someone who can find those workflows, rebuild them, and run them.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will work closely with business leaders, operators, and frontline teams to identify where AI can make the biggest impact, redesign organizational infrastructure and critical workflows around it, and turn those gains into durable systems. This is not a research role or a strategy-deck role. It's a builder-operator role with full autonomy to connect systems, deploy agents, and ship transformation.

What You'll Do

Find the leverage. Sit with teams, map how work actually gets done, and identify the workflows where in-house agents unlock improvements. Act as researcher and consultant - understand and document the end-to-end impact on both our teams and our customers of deploying AI agents to automate manual work.

Design the future state. Redesign workflows around what agents can do. Define where humans stay in the loop and why. Map data flows, agent context requirements, and handoff points. Turn messy, tribal processes into something an agent can execute. Work closely with the AI capabilities team that builds the technology, infrastructure, and knowledge layer for Justworks International.

Wire it up. Connect workflows across business systems and ship directly alongside the AI capabilities team.

Ship agents to production. Deploy agents, define evals for every workflow, re-run evals after model or data changes. Monitor quality, cost, latency, and outcomes. Stay close to team needs and how deployments change their work.

Run agents as products. Own the KPIs: volume handled, time saved, quality, cost per task, escalation rate, business outcomes. Hold weekly reviews. Close the loop with the teams whose workflows you transformed.

Partner cross-functionally. Work closely with the AI capabilities team, Ops, CS, and business leadership. You're embedded in the business function, not siloed inside IT or a central AI team.

Who You Are

You are a builder. You communicate business impact, not just technical detail. You can sit with a CS lead for an hour and leave with a clear map of the three workflows most worth rebuilding, then go wire them up yourself with modern agent tooling. You've probably been called "the technical person on a business team" or "the business person on a technical team".

You are scrappy and resourceful. You don't need a roadmap handed to you. You find the highest-leverage problem and start solving it. You proactively identify solutions and unblock yourself without a fully defined path. You have a bias to shipping and a low tolerance for blockers.

You are product-minded. You look beyond the immediate task to understand the "why" behind the build. You question whether it's the right solution before building it. You balance quality with speed - you know when to optimize for durability and when to iterate fast.

You have a learning mindset. You're comfortable in a fast-paced, early-stage environment where best practices are being invented in real time. You read what's happening in AI daily, you've built things with agents on your own time, and you have opinions about what works.

You demonstrate ownership. You identify gaps and drive initiatives to completion without waiting for explicit instructions. When you encounter ambiguity, you address it directly.

Must-Haves

• 5+ years in a role combining business operations or process design with hands-on technical execution - solutions engineering, forward-deployed engineering, founding team at a startup, strategy & ops, or internal tools/automation lead.
• Workflow design chops. You can map a business workflow end-to-end, identify where value is trapped, and redesign it. You are a systems thinker who can abstract the interconnectedness of how things work. You have concrete examples of measurable efficiency or revenue impact.
• Technical fluency. Comfortable in the terminal, reading and writing code, working with APIs, webhooks, and data pipelines. You don't need to be a senior engineer — you need to be unblocked by technical work.
• Real agent experience. You've built something non-trivial with LLMs and agents (at work or on the side). You understand prompts, tools, context windows, evals, retrieval, and the difference between a demo and production.
• Modern AI stack familiarity. Agent frameworks, MCP servers, vector databases, workflow orchestration, eval tooling.
• Operator instincts. You run a tight cadence, track outcomes, hold yourself accountable to KPIs, and communicate clearly with non-technical stakeholders.
• Judgment under autonomy. Flawless business judgment. You keep our values and customer needs at the forefront of every decision.

Nice-to-Haves

• Forward-deployed engineering, solutions engineering, or deployed AI role at a frontier lab, AI infra company, a saas company or applied AI team.
• Former founder or early-stage employee - you know what it means to find and solve around customer pain points.
• Background in EOR, payroll, HR tech, fintech, or B2B SaaS for SMBs.
• Built internal agents, automations, or knowledge bases used by real teams.
• International experience or background

Technologies Used

• Golang, Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Java, C#, Python, VueJS, MySQL, Kafka, AWS, Git, Memcache, Redis, ElasticSearch, Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, CircleCI, DataDog

The base wage range for this position based in our Toronto office is targeted at $167,500.00 to $235,000.00 CAD per year.

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