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