Forward Deployed Engineer

Job description

What is Automat? Automat was founded by a diverse group of creative technologists from teams like Google Creative Lab and Samsung’s Innovation Think Tank. We're building a future where intelligent agents run real business operations, not just support them. Automat Workforce puts AI coworkers directly inside a company's existing tools to handle day-to-day operational work, and our Studio platform gives customers a fully managed way to build, deploy, and monitor their own agents and automations. We value curiosity, collaboration, and impact above rigid requirements. If you're excited about AI and automation, thrive in flexible, creative environments, and want to work on meaningful, pioneering projects, this role is for you. We encourage anyone to apply — we think talent, passion, and your unique perspective can outweigh years of experience. We are really looking for someone who can hit the ground running on day one and contribute at a rapid pace, while also being someone from whom we ourselves can learn. The Role We're looking for a Forward-Deployed Engineer who is an outstanding engineer and a genuinely charismatic customer partner. This is an account-ownership, customer-facing engineering role: you own your accounts end to end, with no dedicated success manager, account lead, or hand-off layer standing between you and the customer. You are the single point of contact who builds the relationship, diagnoses the problem, ships the solution, and helps build, maintain, and expand the account, all at once. You will apply creativity and problem-solving to help customers implement complex business automations via our suite of internal libraries, tools, and products. You'll act as a trusted expert and be a human-in-the-loop partner to our agentic automation engine. This role is inherently cross-functional — you’ll often be the bridge between product, engineering, and customer teams. It is as important to be comfortable with sales conversations and identifying upsell opportunities as it is to understand how we can expand Automat’s suite of AI-powered product offerings to improve velocity and scale. Travel is not required for this role, but is possible. What you’ll do - Build upon our autonomous agent solutions to tailor automation solutions to specific, customer-centric workflows - Configure, prompt, and orchestrate AI agents on Automat Studio so they can navigate complex, and often legacy, enterprise software platforms to achieve our customers' automation goals. - Help manage and support the AI agents powering Workforce deployments for your customers, making sure they run reliably and evolve as customer needs change. - Think creatively about how to align automation strategies with the needs of our customers, while driving long-term innovation and resilience to the entire Automat product offering - Wear multiple hats; one day, you will prototype a new stealth browsing technique, and the next, optimize a pipeline for intelligent document extractions What drives you - Methodically working through complex technical challenges, no matter how detailed or demanding, until the solution emerges - Supporting customer pain points and expanding out-of-the-box product capabilities - Collaborating in teams of both technical and non-technical members - Finding creative, deterministic solutions to complex and unstable technical puzzles - Bringing focus, urgency, and follow-through when deadlines get tight, treating crunch moments as a challenge to rise to rather than a burden to endure What’s in your toolbox - Excellent communication and collaboration skills - Demonstrated success in a customer-facing technical role (e.g., sales engineering, solutions engineering, forward-deployed engineering, etc.) - Comfortable orchestrating and configuring AI agents on a modern agent platform - Directing, prompting, and tuning agents more often than hand-writing browser automation scripts, though a web automation background (Selenium, Playwright, etc.) is still useful for understanding how the underlying agents work - Ample experience using AI tools effectively (e.g., Cursor, Windsurf, Lovable, etc.) What we are looking for - Top notch communication and collaboration skills, particularly bridging discussions between technical and non-technical teams - Comfort navigating ambiguity and wearing multiple hats - Proactive mindset and high initiative, with a bias toward action - An intrinsic desire to leave things better than you found them - Work across the stack and be multi-disciplinary - Experience as an IC in startups or other dynamic, high-growth settings