Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

This is a first-of-its-kind, customer-facing engineering role at an early-stage Y Combinator–backed insurtech startup building AI agents for insurance agencies. You'll own deployments end-to-end — from scoping messy, undocumented workflows to shipping production AI agents that live inside customers' operating systems. The role sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success, and carries real influence over how the platform evolves.

What You'll Do

• Own customer deployments from initial scope through go-live, working directly with agency owners and ops leads to understand how they actually operate.

• Build integrations into the systems agencies already use, whether they have clean APIs, outdated docs, or no documentation at all.

• Extract tribal knowledge from domain experts and turn it into system design, then ship it.

• Diagnose and resolve customer issues directly, delivering quick fixes and small customizations that make AI agents fit real workflows.

• Spot expansion opportunities within accounts by maintaining a close cadence with customers and identifying patterns across deployments.

• Feed failure patterns back into the platform so the same problem doesn't get solved twice.

• Travel to customer sites to ensure successful deployments and sustained adoption.

What We're Looking For

• 2+ years shipping production code in Python, with at least one AI application deployed to real users.

• Hands-on experience designing and iterating evals for real-world LLM performance and consistency at scale.

• Strong proficiency with APIs and multi-system integrations, including legacy or poorly-documented endpoints.

• Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and AI agent development.

• Familiarity with voice or telephony stacks (e.g. Twilio or similar) is a strong plus.

• Comfortable reverse-engineering undocumented systems and working with incomplete information.

• Background at an early-stage startup or demonstrated ownership of ambiguous, end-to-end projects without an established playbook.

• Strong communication skills — able to translate between technical and non-technical stakeholders clearly.

• Willingness and ability to travel to customer sites.

• Domain knowledge in insurance, financial services, or B2B SaaS operations is a plus.

• US citizenship or valid US work authorization required; visa sponsorship is not available.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $110,000 – $180,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.