Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Job Summary

Essential Functions

• Shadow underwriters on-site to map submission lifecycles, identify actors, systems, handoffs and exceptions, then deliver diagrams, assumptions logs, and prioritized build recommendations
• Develop and ship production integrations including LLM extraction, customer-specific prompt tuning, evaluation datasets, agentic rules from underwriting guidelines, email intake automation, and payloads into policy administration systems
• Lead pilots from kickoff through go-live, stabilization, user training, and iterative improvement that reduces effort for future deployments
• Facilitate weekly customer calls with major insurance carriers to demonstrate progress and manage 8-12 week deployment timelines
• Design and maintain evaluation frameworks using ground truth datasets, recall and accuracy metrics, and scientific methods to guide production decisions
• Collaborate with the core engineering team on backend services and platform features during fluctuating integration demands

Required Qualifications

• 1-3 years of experience as a founding engineer or forward deployed engineer at an early-stage startup (pre-seed through Series A)
• Strong backend engineering skills with production service delivery using Python, TypeScript, SQL, or similar technologies
• Hands-on experience building and shipping LLM or VLM applications in production environments
• Proven ability to run customer integration calls and own end-to-end technical outcomes
• Scientific mindset with experience building evaluation frameworks, ground truth datasets, and data-driven AI improvements
• Willingness to work in-person five days per week in San Francisco and remain highly responsive on evenings and weekends
• Mission-driven with high agency, comfort working independently or collaboratively, and eagerness to engage directly with enterprise clients

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience as a founding or forward deployed engineer at a YC or Pear-grade company
• Background building document ingestion pipelines, agentic workflows, or multi-agent orchestration systems
• Experience integrating with enterprise insurance systems such as policy administration platforms
• Track record turning customer insights into internal tooling and product priorities that improve deployment velocity

Technical Skills

• Python
• PostgreSQL
• SQL
• Azure
• LLMs and VLMs
• Prompt Engineering
• AI Agents
• Agentic Workflows
• Document Ingestion and Parsing
• RAG and Retrieval Systems
• Evaluation Frameworks
• Worker Orchestration

Education & Certifications

Compensation & Benefits