Forward Deployed Engineer (Agentic Systems)
Location: Onsite in Chatsworth, California
Salary Range: $120,000-$150,000
Position Overview
Were hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to deploy autonomous AI agents into real enterprise workflows. This is a ship-the-product-in-the-field role: you'll work directly with customers to map messy processes, build and integrate agentic systems (tools + planning + memory), and own production reliability end-to-end.
Were looking for someone with hands-on experience shipping agentic workflows (tools + planning + state/memory) and the engineering rigor to support them in production (evals + observability).
About Us
Were a stealth-stage startup building enterprise-grade AI agent platforms that automate long-running, knowledge-intensive processes. Our focus is on systems that can:
- Understand organizational context
- Integrate with existing workflows and enterprise software
- Maintain coherent state and knowledge across extended interactions
- Operate reliably in production with measurable business outcomes
- This is not chatbot tech — its the infrastructure layer for the next generation of enterprise software.
Role & Responsibilities
Core Responsibilities
- Own 0-1 enterprise deployments: discovery prototype production rollout iterate until measurable ROI
- Design and build agentic systems with tool calling, planning/execution loops, state/memory, and human-in-the-loop (HITL) controls
- Implement reliability mechanisms: retries, timeouts, checkpointing, idempotency, and safe failure modes
- Build enterprise integrations (e.g., Slack/Jira/Salesforce/ServiceNow/SQL/SharePoint/knowledge bases), including auth, permissions, and auditability
- Create evaluation and monitoring systems: offline regression suites, dataset replay, and production quality/cost/latency dashboards
- Debug real failures in production: non-determinism, flaky tools, prompt regressions, partial outages, and agent got stuck scenarios
- Collaborate with the founding team to shape product roadmap, technical strategy, and deployment playbooks
Technical Problem Areas (Not Exhaustive)
- Long-running agent workflows with persistent state and memory across sessions
- Orchestration patterns for multi-step, multi-tool processes
- Guardrails, verification, and human approval gates for high-stakes actions
- Reliability + observability (tracing, structured logs, prompt/tool versioning, replay)
- Enterprise security requirements: access control, audit logs, compliance constraints
- Evaluation and benchmarking of agent performance in real production environments
Required Qualifications
- Proof you've shipped agentic systems: built and deployed at least one system that includes tool use + planning + state/memory + reliability mechanisms (work or OSS)
- Experience with evaluation of LLM/agent behavior (task suites, regression tests, acceptance metrics, quality thresholds)
- Production engineering mindset: tracing/logging, incident-style debugging, rollout/rollback strategies, versioning prompts/tools
- Strong software engineering fundamentals (Python and/or TypeScript), API integrations, and systems thinking
- Comfortable working directly with customers and owning outcomes end-to-end (Forward Deployed / customer-zero mentality)
- Willingness to work onsite in Chatsworth, California
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with agent frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, CrewAI, DSPy) in real deployments
- Workflow engines for long-running processes (e.g., Temporal/Cadence, Airflow/Dagster as applicable)
- Built agent observability: OpenTelemetry-style traces, replay pipelines, prompt/version registries, cost/latency instrumentation
- Experience with enterprise software integration patterns and security/compliance constraints (PII, access control, auditability)
- Familiarity with fine-tuning and adaptation methods (RAG, routing, lightweight fine-tunes, tool augmentation)
Who You Are
- You love deploying real systems into messy environments and iterating fast
- You think in systems: failure modes, tradeoffs, correctness, reliability, scalability
- You're pragmatic and execution-oriented, but you care deeply about engineering quality
- You're excited about the limits of agents and motivated to push them responsibly in production
- You can communicate clearly with both technical teams and enterprise stakeholders
What We Offer
- Competitive compensation + meaningful equity, aligned with early-stage risk/reward
- Direct access to the founding team and high ownership from day one
- Resources to ship: strong engineering support and the compute/tools needed to deploy real agentic systems
- A high-velocity environment where youll help define the product, the architecture, and the deployment playbook
Culture & Environment
- Direct access to the founding team and fast, collaborative decision-making
- Opportunity to shape product direction and deployment strategy from day one
- Fast-paced environment with high ownership and high impact
Location
Onsite in Chatsworth, California with core collaboration hours expected. We believe proximity matters for early-stage execution, especially while defining architecture, product, and deployment playbooks.