Forward Deployed Engineer

Job description

**About Waniwani** Waniwani builds the infrastructure that distributes insurance and banking products through AI assistants. We raised an $8M seed led by Seedcamp and work with large European banks and insurers. Each enterprise deal has to be scoped, architected, and deployed into a regulated environment. This role owns the layer between a signed deal and a live deployment. **The role** - **Customer workshops, discovery, and requirements (35%).** Run technical discovery and workshops with each client, and translate their needs into clear, buildable product requirements for our sales, ops, and engineering teams. Flag what we need to build to support a given setup, such as client self-hosting. - **Solution architecture and documentation (35%).** Design the end-to-end MCP flow and integration architecture for each client, including hosted versus on-premise scenarios, and produce the technical documentation enterprise clients require (BPI France alone is roughly 50 docs). - **Procurement, security, and delivery oversight (30%).** Use our existing compliance library (SOC 2 program, DPAs, prior questionnaire answers) to complete security questionnaires, handle security committees and data-residency questions, and drive procurement to completion. Oversee the MCP deployment itself, which our freelancer network implements. Across all three, you build the reusable kit that makes this repeatable: scoping templates, architecture patterns, and a procurement answer library. **Objectives** - **90 days:** own scoping and procurement response for active deals, with the reusable kit used on at least one live deal end to end. - **6 months:** run the full signed-to-live pipeline, including architecture decisions and procurement ownership, without founders in the critical path. - **12 months:** a repeatable delivery process with patterns reused across clients, and a case for the first hire under this role. **Requirements** - You are technically credible: you read code, reason fluently about integrations and the MCP and agent stack, and can scope and oversee a deployment. This is not a hands-on production-coding role; implementation is handled by our freelancer network. - You are comfortable leading technical conversations with enterprise clients. - You can drive a security questionnaire or procurement process to completion from existing documentation. - You have worked in or near regulated industries (finance, insurance) and understand compliance and data residency requirements. - You work well in ambiguity across sales, ops, and engineering, and ramp into new domains quickly. - You have an interest in the MCP and agent stack. - You are open to traveling from time to time across Europe and the US to meet clients. **What this role is not** - A backend engineering role. You will work with clients most of the week. - A pure pre-sales role. You own architecture, requirements, and delivery oversight, not only the pitch. - A slideware role. You need real technical depth, even though you are not writing production code day to day. **Practicalities** - Remote-first, based in Europe. Expect travel roughly once a month, primarily Paris, London, and Madrid, with US travel around the 6-month mark. Being able to come to Paris occasionally is a plus but not required. - First hire in this function, working directly with the founders and the engineering team. **Process** - Intro call with our talent partner. - 30-minute conversation with Max, our CTO. - Work sample based on a real client scenario (live session): scope the flow, draft the architecture, and handle a mock procurement Q&A. - Discussions with Robin, our CEO, Luiza, and members of the tech team. - Reference checks.