Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Job description

FOUNDING FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER New York City · In Person · Travel Required ABOUT FRONTDESK Frontdesk is building AI workers that run customer operations across voice, text, email, and chat. Over the last year, the size of the contracts we've been closing has increased roughly 10x, with several enterprise deals now reaching six figures and beyond. At that scale, deployment stops being simple. Our largest customers need custom integrations, complex workflows, outbound orchestration, legacy systems connected, and dozens of edge cases handled before AI can actually run meaningful parts of their business. We're looking for the person who wants to own that problem. THE ROLE We're hiring our Founding Forward Deployed Engineer. You will take our hardest enterprise customers from: "We want Frontdesk to do this" → "It's live in production." There won't always be a playbook. You might fly to a customer's office, sit with their operators, understand a workflow nobody has documented properly, design the solution, and then build the missing integration or product capability yourself. You won't throw requirements over the wall to another team. You'll work directly in the codebase and own the outcome. And once it works, you'll ask the most important question: How do we make sure we never have to build this from scratch again? You'll take what you learn in the field and turn it into reusable Frontdesk product, infrastructure, and deployment primitives. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own our largest and most technically difficult enterprise deployments. - Work directly with customers to understand how their businesses actually operate. - Build integrations, workflows, internal tooling, and product capabilities needed to get them live. - Travel onsite when being in the room helps us solve the problem faster. - Work across voice, SMS, email, chat, APIs, data, LLMs, and workflow orchestration. - Debug whatever is blocking a deployment, even when the problem sits outside Frontdesk. - Identify patterns across customers and turn one-off solutions into scalable product. - Work closely with the founders and engineering team on what Frontdesk should build next. THIS IS A FOUNDING ROLE We expect this to become a major function inside Frontdesk. At first, you'll be extremely hands-on. You'll write code, work with customers, and personally own deployments. As we scale, we expect you to build and eventually lead the Forward Deployed Engineering organization. That means defining how we deploy enterprise AI, hiring the team, building the playbooks, and determining how Forward Deployed Engineering works with Product, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success. We're looking for someone who doesn't just want a job. We're looking for someone who wants to build something from zero, own a massive surface area, and eventually lead the organization they create. YOU MIGHT BE A FIT IF YOU - Are a strong software engineer who wants more ownership than a traditional engineering role provides. - Love talking to customers and solving real problems, not just working from tickets. - Are comfortable jumping across the stack and learning whatever is necessary. - Have strong product intuition and naturally think about how to generalize what you build. - Thrive when the problem is ambiguous and there is no existing playbook. - Move extremely quickly and take personal ownership over outcomes. - Would rather own an entire problem than a small piece of a large system. - Could see yourself founding a company someday, or already think like a founder.