Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Job description

The role This is a founding role. Forward Deployed Engineering at Gridsight will not be a copy-and-paste model from another company. Our power-system domain is highly specialised, our enterprise go-to-market motion is complex, and the AI landscape is changing quickly. You will help establish the practical model through real work, not inherit one, and have to spend time with both our GTM teams and customers to make it happen. In the first phase, your primary customers will be internal: our experienced power engineers and U.S. go-to-market team. You will embed in how they work, understand the customer problems they are solving and the constraints they operate under, aggregate their requirements, and separate the stated request from the underlying need. You will then become the primary field customer and product partner for the tooling being built with Product and Engineering. They will own the core tooling and platform build; you will own making sure it solves real work. You will dogfood it on live problems, pressure-test it, turn evidence into clear requirements and acceptance criteria, and keep the iteration loop tight until the tools are genuinely useful and trustworthy. Once the tooling is ready, you will lead its rollout across the U.S. team. These are expert, time-poor practitioners who cannot afford to take a risk on an immature workflow. You will earn adoption by proving value, working alongside them through the transition, setting clear operating standards, measuring whether the new way is working, and preventing a quiet regression to old patterns. As our founding FDE, you will help establish how the function operates while remaining a senior, hands-on individual contributor. You will work alongside our power engineers and go-to-market team as a technically credible peer, with real authority over the tooling interface, rollout and agreed ways of working. You will not inherit a large team or a finished playbook. This is not a conventional product-management, pre-sales or solutions-engineering role. You will stay close to the customer, the power-engineering work, the data and the code—building prototypes, integrations or production-quality software when that is the fastest path to learning and impact. What you’ll own Discovery and requirements: embed with our power engineers and go-to-market team, map the real workflows and constraints behind strategic utility work, and identify the highest-leverage problems for tooling to solve. Dogfooding and quality: be the first serious user of new FDE and AI tooling on live work; test its usefulness, correctness, reliability and fit with the realities of critical infrastructure. The field–product iteration loop: turn direct evidence into clear requirements, priorities and acceptance criteria; work tightly with Product and Engineering as tools are designed, built and improved. Hands-on technical execution: investigate data, write Python and SQL, build prototypes and integrations, debug workflows, and step into high-priority customer work when required. Rollout and adoption: onboard the U.S. team, train and support users in real engagements, establish the new operating cadence, measure adoption and outcomes, and intervene when the team slips back into lower-leverage ways of working. Standards and operating discipline: define how the tools should be used, the quality bar for AI-assisted work, when human review is required, and how lessons and failure modes are captured. Compounding leverage: turn recurring field needs into reusable workflows, product capabilities and playbooks so every engagement makes the next one faster and better. The founding FDE operating model: help leadership define engagement criteria, decision rights, handoffs and measures of success based on evidence from the field—not assumptions imported from another company. What we’re looking for You are a product-minded software engineer. You have built and shipped maintainable software inside a product-engineering organisation and understand how strong product and engineering teams discover, prioritise, build, test and operate software. You have meaningful power or utility context. Experience in power systems, utilities, grid technology or adjacent critical infrastructure is strongly preferred; you can earn credibility with domain experts and understand why correctness matters. You are deeply hands-on. You are fluent in Python, SQL, APIs, data pipelines, cloud systems and modern developer tooling, and you can investigate, prototype, debug and ship without waiting for another team. You understand modern data and AI workflows. Experience with platforms such as Databricks and with AI-native developer and agentic tooling is valuable, alongside rigorous approaches to evaluation, security and correctness. You are excellent at discovery. You observe how people actually work, ask the questions that reveal the root problem, and distinguish a one-off request from a need worth solving repeatedly. You have strong product judgement. You can translate technical user needs into useful tools and know when to build, iterate, simplify or stop. You can make a new way of working stick. You have driven adoption of new tools or workflows with busy technical teams under live delivery pressure, using credibility and evidence while holding a clear line on agreed standards. You are credible in complex enterprise environments. You communicate clearly with hands-on engineers, utility leaders and executives, and connect technical work to customer and commercial outcomes. You are comfortable leading without hierarchy. You have high agency, low ego and sound judgement; you work as a peer, take ownership of difficult work and create momentum across functional boundaries. You are built for the field. You are willing to travel regularly, spend meaningful time with customers and the U.S. team, and treat direct observation as primary engineering input. Experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, customer-embedded product engineer or technical lead is helpful, but the exact title is not important. We care most about evidence that you can build product-quality software, understand power engineers, and make a better way of working real. Why join Gridsight The grid is the backbone of the modern economy. Electricity demand is accelerating, and utilities need better ways to identify capacity, connect customers, and make informed grid investments. Gridsight has differentiated technology, meaningful customer outcomes, strong investor backing, and a large opportunity to grow in the United States—driving significant impact towards clean energy abundance. As our Founding Forward Deployed Engineer, you will work directly with the founders and leaders across Product, Engineering and go-to-market to create a uniquely Gridsight FDE model. You will shape how our experts use AI, how our tools are built and adopted, and how learning from the field compounds into the platform. This is an opportunity to combine software engineering, power systems, product judgement and change leadership with broad ownership from day one. The energy transition is increasing grid complexity at exactly the moment utilities need to move faster. Gridsight gives utilities a real-time, dynamic understanding of how power flows through the distribution grid. Our Grid Intelligence Platform combines utility data, AI, and physics-based modeling to help utilities connect customers faster, unlock existing capacity, improve network visibility, and manage distributed energy resources at scale. We recently raised our Series B to accelerate platform development and expansion in the United States. We operate in a complex enterprise market where technical credibility, customer outcomes, trusted relationships, and the ability to turn difficult customer problems into working solutions all matter. We are looking for a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to help build the AI-native way our power engineers and go-to-market team solve Gridsight’s hardest utility problems—and turn that work into durable product and company leverage.