Forward Deployed Engineer

Production experience. You have shipped systems that real users depended on, and you have been on the hook when they broke. You can talk specifically about an outage or failure you handled and what you changed after.

Integration fluency. REST APIs, webhooks, OAuth flows, rate limiting, retries, idempotency, queues. You have connected systems that did not want to be connected, and you know where these projects go wrong.

Solid coding in Python or TypeScript. Not framework trivia. The ability to write a reliable service, script, or automation quickly and leave it maintainable.

Working infrastructure knowledge. Linux, containers, environment management, secrets handling, basic CI/CD. Enough to deploy and operate what you build without waiting on someone else.

Client-ready communication. Clear written English, confident on calls, able to deliver bad news early and plainly.

Composure under pressure. Evidence that you have kept delivering when timelines were tight, requirements moved, or something was on fire.

AI/LLM integration experience: model APIs, tool/function calling, MCP, RAG fundamentals.

Prior agency, consulting, or forward-deployed experience.

Experience inside enterprise client environments: SSO, VPNs, security reviews, procurement-grade documentation.

50% Integrations. This is the core of the job. Connecting client systems to each other and to AI: CRMs, ticketing systems, Slack, email, databases, internal tools, third-party APIs. Reading someone else's API docs, handling their broken auth flow, working around their rate limits, and making data move reliably between systems that were never designed to talk to each other. Most of what we deliver is not new software. It is existing systems, finally connected, with AI in the loop.

25% Writing Code. The glue, the middleware, the automations, and the occasional custom interface. Python or TypeScript, small services, webhooks, scheduled jobs, data transforms. Clean enough that another engineer can maintain it, fast enough that the client sees progress every week.

25% Client Facing. Scoping calls, weekly check-ins, demos, and the hard conversations when scope shifts or something breaks. You explain technical decisions to non-technical people without jargon and without hiding behind it. The client should know your name and trust it.

A practical exercise built around a realistic integration problem, not a whiteboard puzzle.

A deep walkthrough of one production system you shipped: decisions, failures, fixes.

A scenario conversation: a client call where scope is shifting and the timeline is not. We want to see how you think and how you communicate, not whether you have a script.