Forward Deployed Engineer, SF

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

Forward Deployed Engineer

Location - San Francisco, CA - (On-site – 5 Days Per Week) - Requires up to 25% travel to customer sites and an initial onboarding period in London.

Compensation - $200,000 – $400,000 Base + Competitive Equity

Visa - H1B Transfers Supported

Company Stage - Series A ($20M+ Raised)

Industry - Artificial Intelligence, Developer Tools, Testing Infrastructure, Browser Technology, Enterprise SaaS, Developer Productivity, B2B Software

About the Company

The company is building one of the most advanced autonomous software testing platforms, eliminating the need for developers to manually write and maintain frontend tests.

Its platform automatically observes real user interactions and generates deterministic end-to-end tests that continuously validate complex web applications. Customers include some of the fastest-growing technology companies in the world, including Notion, Discord, Dropbox, ElevenLabs, Wiz, and CoreWeave.

Backed by investors behind Twilio, Twitch, PagerDuty, Intercom, and Vercel, along with founders and engineering leaders from GitHub, Datadog, Dropbox, Segment, and Cursor, the company has become one of the fastest-growing infrastructure startups, growing more than 5x year-over-year while serving high-value enterprise customers.

As the first Forward Deployed Engineer in San Francisco, you'll establish the company's US Forward Deployed Engineering function while partnering directly with engineering leaders at some of the world's most innovative software companies. You'll combine deep software engineering, product development, customer architecture, and technical leadership while helping shape both customer deployments and the core product itself.

This is an exceptional opportunity to join a hypergrowth AI infrastructure company where engineers operate with founder-level ownership, define entirely new functions, and build technology used by world-class engineering organizations.

What You'll Do

Own end-to-end customer deployments from technical discovery through production rollout

Architect implementation strategies for enterprise engineering organizations

Embed directly with customer engineering teams to integrate the platform into complex production environments

Write production code across the company's core platform to unblock customer deployments

Debug complex browser internals, CI/CD systems, testing infrastructure, and web application architectures

Build new platform capabilities driven by customer requirements

Navigate unfamiliar production codebases and rapidly identify technical solutions

Partner directly with VP Engineering, Staff Engineers, and executive technical leadership at enterprise customers

Lead technical pilots while serving as the primary engineering point of contact

Shape the long-term product roadmap through insights gathered from customer deployments

Establish Forward Deployed Engineering processes, tooling, and best practices as the US organization scales

Collaborate closely with the CTO, founders, engineering leadership, and product teams to deliver exceptional customer outcomes

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

3–8 years of professional software engineering experience

Experience shipping production software end-to-end

Experience working at high-growth startups or technically demanding engineering organizations

Experience writing production code recently in modern software environments

Experience owning customer deployments, integrations, or technical implementations

Strong startup ownership mentality with demonstrated engineering execution

Experience working directly with engineering customers and technical stakeholders

Founding engineer, ex-founder, or early engineering experience strongly preferred

Experience working across customer-facing engineering and product development preferred

Experience operating independently with significant technical ownership

Technical Requirements

Strong full-stack software engineering fundamentals

Expert JavaScript and TypeScript experience

Strong understanding of browser internals and modern web architecture

Experience debugging unfamiliar production codebases

Strong CI/CD pipeline and testing infrastructure knowledge

Experience with Web APIs and frontend platform architecture

Strong systems design and software architecture capability

Ability to solve complex algorithmic and coding problems under pressure

Experience integrating developer tooling into large production environments

Comfortable rapidly understanding and improving sophisticated engineering systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or another technical discipline preferred

Strong engineering background with demonstrated software development expertise

Top technical universities or exceptional engineering accomplishments strongly preferred

Soft Skills

Outstanding technical problem-solving

Strong engineering ownership

Excellent customer communication skills

High execution mentality

Comfortable operating with ambiguity

Strong collaboration skills

Entrepreneurial mindset

Structured systems thinker

Passion for developer tools and engineering productivity

Continuous learner embracing modern AI-assisted software development

Compensation & Benefits

Base Salary: $200,000 – $400,000

Competitive Equity Package

Opportunity to become the first US Forward Deployed Engineer

Direct collaboration with founders, CTO, and engineering leadership

Significant ownership across customer success and product direction

Exceptional career growth with a clear path into technical leadership

Hypergrowth Series A company growing more than 5x annually

International team offsites, premium benefits, generous home office budget, unlimited books, and world-class engineering culture

Why Join

This is an opportunity to help define how one of the fastest-growing developer infrastructure companies scales its customer engineering organization.

You'll work at the intersection of software engineering, browser technology, developer tooling, enterprise architecture, and customer success while partnering directly with some of the world's best engineering teams.

As the first Forward Deployed Engineer in San Francisco, you'll build production software, influence product direction, establish the US FDE playbook, and help shape how modern engineering organizations adopt next-generation developer infrastructure.