Forward Deployed Engineer

About the company

Our client is a small software company.

The role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Take early-stage software from server-side code to a usable interface, working alongside customers and technical leadership to shape what gets built next. Ownership of core systems begins on day one.

What you'll do

- Ship complete features across server-side code and the user interface.

- Spend time on site with the people who use the product to understand their daily work.

- Turn what you learn in the field into product direction alongside technical leadership.

- Own core systems from the early days of the product.

Requirements

What we're looking for

- Explains technical ideas clearly to both technical and non-technical people.

- Has shipped production software end to end, including backend and enough front end to make it real.

- Drives work independently, proposing problems to solve and approaches without waiting for direction.

- Background in young companies, particularly industry-focused software or AI teams that deal with older systems.

- Hands-on time at a company where artificial intelligence is the core product.

- Comfortable translating client needs into engineering specs and seeing the work through to launch.

- Experience putting large language model functionality into live products, including structured outputs, external tool invocation, chained agent steps and search-based context lookup.

- Proficient at making language-model software reliable in production: strict data contracts, guarding against fabricated output, keeping people in the review loop, and measuring quality with automated test suites and model-graded scoring.

- Willing to travel to customer locations around the US roughly twice each quarter.

Bonus points

- Past experience founding a company, or familiarity with car dealership operations.

- Experience with agent frameworks and agent-UI protocols.

- Familiarity with connecting to outside software services through authorization flows, event callbacks and data format translation.

- Experience with speech-to-text or multimodal work, such as voice or photo, in noisy real-world settings.

Benefits

Compensation and benefits

- Base salary: $187K - $220K

- Equity

- Health insurance coverage

Location and work model

- San Mateo, California, United States

- Hybrid, 3 days a week in office (Tuesday to Thursday)

- Full-time