Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
About Us
Global trade still runs on outdated, manual workflows - we are fixing that by building AI agents for the logistics industry. Our AI works alongside humans, automating document-heavy tasks so companies can process shipments faster and with fewer errors.
We have moved past the "zero-to-one" phase and have achieved clear product-market fit. We are currently seeing rapid traction and are already deployed with customers processing meaningful operational volume. We've raised $4.5M from First Round Capital and Pear VC and are now scaling our platform's breadth and depth. Our deeply technical team comes from Google, LinkedIn, Salesforce and top schools and AI research labs.
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The Role
As our Founding Forward Deployed Engineer, you will be the technical owner of Amari's deepest enterprise customer relationships. You will live inside the workflows of logistics companies - writing the code, designing the integrations, and shipping the customer-facing capabilities that make Amari real in production.
You will be the first FDE on the team, which means you set the bar. You will define what "good" looks like for customer-facing engineering at Amari: how we scope, how we ship, how we test, and how we turn customer-facing work into broader platform leverage. You will work directly with founders, engineering leadership, and customer decision-makers. You will be the technical mind on the accounts that matter most to the company.
What You'll Do
Own strategic enterprise accounts end-to-end: Be the technical owner of our most important customers. Run technical discovery, design the integration
architecture, build customer-facing capabilities, and stay deeply engaged through go-live and beyond.
Ship customer-facing engineering: Write production code that touches document-heavy workflows, regulatory filing surfaces, customer integrations, and AI-driven extraction pipelines. Your code runs against real shipments.
Build customer-facing capabilities that strengthen the broader Amari platform: Bring learnings back to the core platform team so every Amari customer gets a stronger product.
Set the bar for customer-facing engineering: Define our standards for testing, staging discipline, deployment safety, and code quality on customer-facing surfaces. Raise the level of engineers working on accounts. Be the model for how this work gets done at Amari.
Who We're Looking For
5-9 years of professional software engineering experience, with meaningful time as a senior IC or tech lead. You've shipped production systems at scale and been on the hook when they broke.
Customer-embedded engineering background. You've done this work before - as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer who codes, Implementation Engineer, or a similar customer-facing technical role at a high-growth AI or enterprise software company.
You're comfortable handling Director-level stakeholders.Strong Python fundamentals. You can navigate document processing pipelines, modern AI/LLM infrastructure and integrations. Frontend reps are a plus but not a requirement.
Disciplined pragmatism. You ship pragmatic code with tests. You know when a hack is the right call - and you know how to refactor it before it becomes tech debt.
Pattern recognition. You see the same customer ask twice and instinctively reach for an abstraction.
Domain advantage (significant plus): Direct experience in logistics.
In-Person Collaboration: You are energized by working shoulder-to-shoulder with founders and engineers in our San Francisco office.
Is This the Right Fit?
You will love this role if:
You want to be the technical face of strategic accounts
You thrive in customer chaos and find energy in turning messy real-world work into clean product capabilities
You want founding-level ownership and equity, with the title and impact to match
You're tired of writing code without knowing who uses it or whether it actually works for them
This might not be for you if
You prefer deep work without customer surface area
You need clean specs, narrowly bounded scope, or extensive process to be productive
The idea of getting on a customer call at 4pm on a Friday to debug a production issue makes you tense rather than focused