Job Details

Who is Recruiting from Scratch: Recruiting from Scratch is a talent firm that focuses on placing the best candidate for our clients. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across North America, South America, and Europe to help them hire.

Title of Role: Forward Deployed Engineer
Location: San Francisco, CA
Company Stage of Funding: Early-stage Venture-backed
Office Type: On-site, 5 Days a Week
Salary: $150,000 - $250,000 (Up to $300,000 for senior candidates with 5+ years of experience)
Company Description
Our client is a venture-backed AI infrastructure startup based in San Francisco, developing high-performance solutions to support the next generation of AI applications. Their mission is to bring cutting-edge machine learning capabilities directly to enterprise workflows, enabling teams to ship scalable, production-ready AI systems faster than ever before.

Working with some of the most ambitious organizations building in AI, they offer a high-performance engineering culture and the opportunity to make an outsized impact in an early-stage environment. This is a rare opportunity to be at the intersection of machine learning, product engineering, and real-world deployment-on the ground floor of a company scaling fast.
What You Will Do
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will serve as the technical bridge between the internal engineering team and external customers, taking ownership of high-impact deployments and ensuring that AI-driven systems are successfully integrated and productionized.

You will:

• Own customer deployments end-to-end - from discovery calls and solution design to shipping robust AI systems into production environments.
• Build AI-powered agents and backend services, working across large-scale data ingestion, infrastructure integration, model tuning, and deployment.
• Iterate quickly on full-stack systems: build prototypes, set up CI/CD, monitor live performance, and optimize for reliability, latency, and security.
• Act as the primary technical point of contact with customer teams, ensuring alignment on milestones, facilitating communication, and resolving roadblocks.
• Collaborate with product and platform teams to feed back implementation insights, propose new features, and improve platform capabilities for future deployments.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys working across the stack, thrives in fast-paced environments, and wants to make a direct customer-facing impact with bleeding-edge AI.
Ideal Background

• 3-6 years of hands-on engineering experience, preferably in customer-facing or high-ownership roles such as solutions engineer, forward deployed engineer, or full-stack product engineer.
• Track record of independently delivering complex technical solutions in production environments.
• Prior experience at early-stage startups or as a founder is highly valued.
• Proficient in backend development, especially with Python (Django preferred).
• Hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-powered systems or AI/ML applications.
• Strong communication skills and a problem-solving mindset in customer-facing situations.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving, high-ownership culture with long-term technical upside.

Preferred

• Background in computer science or engineering from a top-tier university.
• Familiarity with frontend frameworks such as Next.js and React.
• Experience setting up cloud infrastructure and monitoring pipelines for production AI systems.
• Demonstrated use of AI to automate parts of the engineering workflow.
• Comfortable working under startup-style constraints and urgency.

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary Range: $150,000 - $250,000
  (Up to $300,000 base salary for candidates with 5+ years of strong relevant experience)
• Equity: Substantial equity stake with significant upside at early stage
• Work Setup: On-site, 5 days/week in San Francisco
• Visa Sponsorship: Available for qualified candidates
• Benefits Include:
  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance
  • Team offsites and events
  • Opportunity to work closely with experienced founders and world-class engineers
  • Clear trajectory toward senior leadership roles as the company scales

This role is perfect for engineers who thrive in high-ownership environments, want to shape how AI meets real-world needs, and are excited to join a small, high-caliber team solving hard problems at the edge of innovation.

Salary Range: $150,000-$250,000 base.