Forward Deployed Engineer

Company: Confidential - Seed-stage public-safety AI startup
Location: New York, NY or San Francisco Bay Area
Compensation: $140,000 - $220,000 + founding-level equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Not available

About the Company

A seed-stage startup founded by former Palantir engineers that helps law enforcement agencies search digital evidence and solve major crimes faster, with live agency deployments and paying customers.

The Role

Our client is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to own customer outcomes end to end: scope pilots, ingest messy evidentiary data, configure the product per agency, sit with detectives and prosecutors while they work cases, write scripts and integrations when the product does not quite fit, and feed learnings into the roadmap. You own the customer relationship from pilot through first renewal. Time is roughly 60% customer-facing, 30% building and 10% internal. This is not a sales engineering seat.

What You Will Do

• Scope pilots with new agencies and turn operational goals into deployment plans.
• Ingest messy evidentiary data (device extractions, call records, license-plate reader data, body cam, jail call audio, PDFs, social media).
• Configure the product per agency and write scripts or integrations as needed.
• Work alongside detectives, prosecutors and analysts and turn workflow gaps into product improvements.
• Own customer relationships from pilot through renewal and expansion.

What You Bring

• 4-8 years of experience
• Strong engineering in Python and/or TypeScript, APIs and data pipelines, shipping small tools without a handoff
• Genuinely customer-facing and comfortable on-site in law-enforcement settings
• Bias to action, comfort with ambiguity and an owner mindset
• Mission alignment with public safety and US government work
• Willingness to complete FBI background checks and CJIS clearance (supported by the company)
• Based in NYC or the SF Bay Area

Nice to Have

• FDE, solutions or implementation experience selling to non-tech-native customers (Palantir FDE is the canonical profile)
• Law enforcement, prosecution, intelligence, defense or forensics exposure
• Familiarity with digital evidence formats
• Design sensibility

Benefits

401(k), medical and dental, and meaningful founding-hire equity (4-year vest, 1-year cliff).