Job Title: Forward Deployed Engineer
Company: Cognistack
Location: New York, NY | San Francisco, CA | Toronto, Canada Workplace Type: Hybrid (Minimum 3 days in-office, 4 days preferred) Employment Type: Full-time Salary: $185,000 - $240,000/year + competitive equity
About the Role We are seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join our team in New York, San Francisco, or Toronto. This is a full-time, hybrid role requiring a minimum of 3 days in-office (4 days preferred). The position involves 2–3 days per week of domestic travel to portfolio company locations.
This is a Palantir-style Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) role at a software holding company. You will embed directly with portfolio companies, ship agentic software into live operations, and own outcomes end-to-end. You will not be writing decks; you will be building running systems that compound across an entire portfolio.
Key Responsibilities
- Embed with portfolio companies to understand their operating model, earn operator trust, and identify the 2–3 highest-leverage workflow opportunities for agentic software.
- Ship the wedge: Build integrations, prompts, evaluations, and UI surfaces to land the first agentic loop at each core platform.
- Operate and tune deployed systems post-launch, adjusting autonomy tiers and handing off cleanly to portfolio operations once stable.
- Serve as the technical face of the client—building trust, setting expectations, and ensuring the system is seen as their leverage.
- Bring patterns back to HQ and codify learnings into reusable playbooks that accelerate every future deployment in the same vertical.
Requirements
- Experience: 3–6 years of experience in full-stack, customer-facing software/product engineering OR forward deployed engineering.
- Background: Experience at a recognizable early/high-growth startup.
- Technical Focus: Generalist who has shipped end-to-end production LLM/agentic software to external users.
- Soft Skills: Strong executive presence and polished communication with C-Suite/GMs. Comfortable traveling on-site to portfolio companies.
- Industry Exposure: Exposure to Private Equity (PE), consulting, or vertical SaaS operator environments (portco, M&A integration, or similar).
- Candidate Profile: Strong archetypes such as ex-founder, founding engineer, or Big Tech background (specifically for new grads).
- Education: Technical degree from a top university.
Technical Skills
- Languages & Frameworks: TypeScript, Python, React, Go, SQL.
- AI/ML: LLMs / Foundation Models, Agentic Workflows, Evals.
- Data & Infrastructure: Snowflake, Databricks, Apache Iceberg, Event-driven Systems.
- General: AI-native with dev tooling and agents to automate manual workflows.
Visa & Eligibility
- Visa sponsorship available for H-1B transfers and TN visas.
- No new H-1B sponsorship.
- Please do not apply if you are not currently based in the USA or Canada.
How to Apply If you have the required skills and experience, please send your resume with details to: 📧 [email protected]
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