Forward Deployed Engineer

Job description

ABOUT US Humaans is building the next generation of infrastructure for the workplace; software designed for companies that are scaling fast, operating globally, and pushing into new boundaries. What started as a system of record has evolved into a broader platform for operating people globally. With Athena, our agentic AI layer, Humaans moves beyond data management into intelligent orchestration, connecting workflows across HR, IT, Finance, and Operations so organisations can act faster and with greater confidence, redefining how work gets done. We work with ambitious teams across Europe and the US, from AI-native companies like Lovable, Poolside, Fyxer AI, and Tandem Health, to established, high-growth organisations scaling internationally and through acquisition, including Quantexa, Sellpy, Manychat, Gigs, Croud, and Threecolts. These teams don’t buy software for features,they buy leverage. The ability to run faster, cleaner, and with more control as complexity compounds. To date, we’ve raised $20m in venture funding from some of the most respected founders, operators, and funds in technology: Lachy Groom (Physical Intelligence), Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Tobias Lütke (Shopify), Dylan Field (Figma), Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn), Claire Johnson (Stripe), Oliver Jay (OpenAI), Jay Simmons (Bond) as well as Y Combinator, Moonfire, Frontline Ventures, Pathlight Ventures, and Exor. If you have massive ambition and want to work on a hard problem, with a small team that moves fast, at a moment when the category is genuinely up for grabs - this is it. THE ROLE Athena is our agentic AI platform for HR, and the category it sits in is being defined right now. There’s no settled playbook for deploying autonomous agents into real enterprises, with messy data, legacy systems and high stakes. You’ll be one of the people writing it. Your job is to turn Athena from a product into outcomes for the companies betting on us. For each customer you work with, you’ll operate with founder-level ownership: understanding the problem, mapping it to the product, building what’s missing and owning the rollout until it’s delivering real value. You’ll be the technical authority customers trust when the questions get hard, while working closely with our Implementation, Product and Engineering teams to turn what you learn in the field into a better product. You’ll own real customers and real deployments from day one, with the autonomy to make judgement calls about how Athena gets deployed and adopted inside complex organisations. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Own enterprise deployments of Athena end to end, partnering with our Implementation team to refine requirements, define use cases, map them to the product and drive successful go-lives - Turn ambiguous customer problems into working technical solutions, making pragmatic decisions about what to configure, integrate or build - Use AI-assisted development to ship production code, integrations and configuration quickly, shortening the traditional engineering loop from days to minutes where possible - Act as the technical point of contact for customers throughout the relationship, earning trust across stakeholders from HR operations to senior leadership - Drive adoption after launch by unblocking teams, resolving technical challenges and identifying new areas where Athena can create value - Help customers get more from Athena by developing a deep understanding of model behaviour, prompting patterns, tools and agent configurations - Bring what you learn in the field directly into the roadmap, working closely with Engineering, Product Design and our CTO to shape what we build next - Be the technical authority during the sales process, helping prospects understand what’s possible and confidently owning the hard technical questions - Develop the patterns and judgement for deploying agentic AI successfully inside complex organisations as we scale WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR - Multiple years of industry experience building full-stack web applications, ideally within SaaS, with the ability to ship production-quality code - Strong TypeScript knowledge and a genuine appreciation for the language - Experience working directly with customers and the confidence to run a room spanning operational teams through to senior leadership - A track record of turning ambiguous business requirements into practical, working solutions - Experience with enterprise integrations such as APIs and SSO; experience with HRIS platforms such as Workday is a strong plus - Hands-on experience with LLMs or agentic systems, whether through prompt engineering, tool calling, evaluation or agent orchestration. You can explain where a model behaved unexpectedly, how you diagnosed it and what you did next - Experience operating in a product or technical area where the playbook wasn’t already written, and comfort being one of the people defining it - A strong bias towards ownership and speed, paired with the judgement to decide what needs to be built now and what can wait - Willingness to travel for onsite work with customers when needed YOU MAY NOT BE A GREAT FIT IF - You want to spend most of your time engineering behind the scenes rather than working directly with customers - You prefer receiving clearly scoped requirements and a prioritised backlog rather than figuring out what needs to happen yourself - You’re uncomfortable shipping quickly, making pragmatic trade-offs or working without a settled playbook - You enjoy customer conversations but don’t want to get hands-on with the code, integrations and technical details required to make a deployment successful - You’re interested in AI conceptually but haven’t spent meaningful time building with LLMs or understanding how they behave in production - You prefer clear boundaries between Engineering, Product, Sales and Customer Success rather than moving between them to own an outcome - You’re not comfortable travelling to work with customers onsite when the situation calls for it This is an in-person role. Our team comes together in the office Monday through Thursday, while most of the team collaborates in person on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. PACKAGE & BENEFITS Early stage startups can be messy – we know that. We're putting effort in providing you with the best employee experience and a quality driven environment in exchange for trusting us. - Market-leading compensation that reflects your value - 25 days paid time off each year plus public holidays - Share Options with 5-year exercise window so you don’t feel pressure to exercise if you leave - Quarterly team events, and company offsites - Top tier private coverage for health, vision and dental care - A new MacBook and tools you need to do your best work - Enhanced parental leave with up to 16 weeks for primary and 4 weeks for secondary - Learning & development budget WHY JOIN HUMAANS TODAY? HR tech is having its AI moment and we’re positioned to own it. Humaans started as a next-gen HRIS taking on large incumbents in a massive market. We’ve since evolved into something even bigger: an AI platform that sits across workforce data and automates the operational layer of HR entirely; the natural progression of what we’ve been building toward. The product is highly differentiated. It’s built around a structured workforce data model that makes AI reliable in an HR context, something no one else has gotten right. Customers notice the difference immediately. We’re backed by Y Combinator, Lachy Groom, Moonfire, Frontline Ventures, and operators who’ve built some of the most consequential software companies of the last decade: the founders of Slack, Figma, and Shopify, and Asana’s former CRO and Head of OpenAI International. We’re a small team with an unapologetically high bar. It shows up in the product, in how we communicate, and in the standards we hold each other to. OUR COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY At Humaans we’re looking for genuinely good people that are transparent and emphatic. We’re committed to providing equal opportunities, a diverse and inclusive work environment, and ensuring a fair interview process for everyone. You’re welcome to apply no matter your gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, civil or family status, age, disability, or race. PRIVACY NOTICE We care about your privacy. When you apply for a role at Humaans, we’ll collect and process your personal data as part of our recruitment process. This includes things like your CV, contact details, and any other information you choose to share. We may also contact you about future opportunities. You can ask us to delete your data at any time. For more details, see our Privacy Policy https://humaans.io/privacy#h.k3wp7f8qzl9x.