Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
Quick facts
- Pay
- $180,000–$250,000 + equity
- Type
- Full-time
- Location
- New York City, New York
- Background
- Bachelor's degree
- Skills
- Python, SQL
- Industry
- Information Technology — 671 open jobs
- Visa in listing
- H-1B, OPT
- Apply
- Free to apply — never pay anyone for a job offer or visa sponsorship
Job description
Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
New York City · On-site · Full-time
Compensation: $180K–$250K base + competitive equity
About the Company
Our client is a well-funded, seed-stage AI company building the revenue execution platform for B2B enterprises. Their product pairs LLMs with structured customer data to tell post-sales teams which accounts to prioritize, why, and what to do next, automating work that account management and customer success teams have long done by hand. They are already live with Fortune 500 customers and have meaningful contracted revenue.
Founded 2025 · Small founding team · Industry: AI, B2B, Enterprise
The Role
As the first Forward Deployed Engineer, you will own the technical deployment of the platform into enterprise customer environments. You will sit between messy customer data warehouses and production agent workflows, turning each customer's business knowledge into verified data models that drive measurable revenue outcomes. You will work directly with the founding team and report to the CTO.
What you'll be doing
- Leading new customer onboardings from start to finish: scoping data access, exploring undocumented warehouses, and mapping complex schemas to business concepts like churn, expansion, and ARR
- Building and validating the semantic layer by working with customer stakeholders, reconciling conflicting definitions, and encoding them as verified SQL
- Deploying workflows and agent pipelines into customer instances, then monitoring them to make sure they deliver results
- Running 2–3 customer engagements at a time in shared channels with customer data and engineering teams (roughly a quarter of your time customer-facing, the rest hands-on data work)
- Using the internal agent tooling daily and shaping how the team improves evals, validation, and the agent harness
Tech stack: SQL, dbt, data warehousing, Python, LLMs, AI agents, signal engineering, eval frameworks
Requirements
- 2–5 years in a forward deployed, data science, or customer-facing engineering role
- A track record of personally leading technical customer deployments, including data access, schema mapping, stakeholder alignment, and demonstrating value
- Experience building and shipping production data pipelines or systems on your own, from writing the code through debugging and deployment
- Strong SQL and data warehouse skills, including working confidently in poorly documented or legacy schemas and producing output you have validated yourself
- A daily AI-first workflow: you use tools like Claude or Cursor and have built or tailored your own agent-based workflows
- Solid applied statistics sense, such as understanding distributions, seasonality, and validation design, and knowing when a result is noise
- A background along one of these paths: forward deployed, customer, or solutions engineering at a leading data or AI company; analytics engineering or data science followed by customer-facing delivery; or consulting, PE, or banking paired with a genuine CS and engineering foundation
- The confidence to hold a technical position when customers push back, while staying open to changing your mind based on evidence
- Comfort with detailed, repetitive data verification, which makes up most of the role
- A bachelor's degree in computer science, data science, statistics, or another quantitative STEM field from a top-tier university
- Based in or willing to relocate to New York City and work in the office five days a week
Nice to Haves
- Experience at an early-stage startup (seed through Series B); large tech company experience is most relevant when combined with startup or founder experience
Why Join
- Join as a founding engineer at a company that already has real enterprise traction and strong investor backing
- Above-market base salary plus meaningful equity, with flexibility for exceptional candidates
- Own the most important technical path in the business, since every customer deployment runs through this role
- Attack a large, underserved market in post-sales execution with one of the first purpose-built platforms
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family, parental leave, a monthly wellness stipend, daily lunches, flexible vacation, and up to $10K in relocation support for out-of-state hires
Details
Location: New York City, NY
Work policy: On-site 5 days a week
Compensation: $180,000–$250,000 + equity
Visa sponsorship: Open to visa transfers (e.g. OPT, H-1B transfers)
Employment type: Full-time
Visa sponsorship record
No public sponsorship records foundWe didn't find H-1B, H-1B1, E-3 or green card (PERM) filings under the name See more jobs at David Joseph & Companyexternal in the Department of Labor and USCIS data. That doesn't mean the job can't be sponsored — the company may file under a different legal name, be new to sponsorship, or sponsor a visa that isn't in these datasets (for example H-2B or J-1).
Tip: ask the recruiter early, in writing, which visa they sponsor and whether they cover the legal and filing fees.
Which visas can work for this job
Occupation: Engineers, All Other (SOC 17-2199) — estimated from the job title.
- Mentioned in the listing
H-1B, OPT
- H-1B cap-exempt employer
Regular cap-subject employer — a new H-1B needs to win the lottery in March (unless you already hold cap-counted H-1B status).
- TN (citizens of Canada and Mexico)
This kind of role may fit the USMCA profession “Engineer” — it depends on the actual duties. No lottery, no cap; you need the matching degree or license.
- E-3 (Australia) and H-1B1 (Chile, Singapore)
Same degree requirement as H-1B, but no lottery and a separate quota that is rarely filled.
- O-1 (extraordinary ability)
For candidates with awards, publications, press, a high salary or critical roles at distinguished organizations. No cap, no lottery; the employer files a petition.
- STEM OPT extension (F-1 students)
Requires an E-Verify employer. We didn't find this company in the E-Verify list — ask HR.
Salary vs prevailing wage
Level IV (fully competent)Engineers, All Other · New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. Annual prevailing wages set by the Department of Labor (OFLC).
| Level | Prevailing wage | H-1B lottery odds* |
|---|---|---|
| Level I | $89,170 | ~15% |
| Level II | $113,942 | ~31% |
| Level III | $138,715 | ~46% |
| Level IV | $163,488 | ~61% |
This job pays $180,000–$250,000 a year — that's Level IV (fully competent). In the wage-weighted H-1B lottery a Level IV registration gets 4 entries; estimated selection chance about 61% — better than average.
* Odds are DHS projections for the FY2027 wage-weighted lottery (actual results vary by year and employer). Since the FY2027 cap season the H-1B lottery is weighted by wage level: Level I = 1 entry, II = 2, III = 3, IV = 4. The level is set by the offered wage against the prevailing wage for the occupation and worksite. Separately, a $100,000 fee for new H-1B petitions for workers outside the US was announced in 2025; as of September 2026 a federal court ruling keeps it unenforceable while appeals continue — check the current status.
Sources: U.S. Department of Labor OFLC disclosure data (H-1B/H-1B1/E-3 LCA, PERM), OFLC prevailing wage data, USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub, E-Verify participating employers. Data loaded: LCA FY2024–FY2026, PERM, USCIS Data Hub, OFLC wages; updated 2026-10-03. Employers are matched by name, so records of companies with similar names can occasionally be mixed up. This is general information, not legal advice — talk to an immigration attorney about your case.