Staff Forward-Deployed Engineer

Job description

Texture is building the operating system for the energy grid. The grid is the largest machine humans have ever built, and it's running on infrastructure designed for a world where electricity flowed one direction from a few big power plants to a lot of dumb meters. That world is gone. Utilities today need to run real-time grid operations, predict transformer failures before they happen, integrate distributed energy resources, break down decades of data silos, and defer hundreds of millions in capital costs — and they're trying to do all of it on infrastructure that wasn't built for any of it. Texture is the data and software layer that makes the modern grid possible. We're 14 people, post-Series A, hiring our next Staff Forward-Deployed Engineer. WHAT THIS ROLE ACTUALLY IS You'll be embedded with a small group of our customers — smaller, member-owned electric utilities (often rural) and the manufacturers of the energy hardware they buy — from kickoff through production. That means: - Joining our delivery and implementation team on customer calls. On the accounts you're embedded with, you'll understand what the customer actually needs (which is rarely what they first ask for) and you'll own the room when the conversation turns technical. - Owning real software work end-to-end — two steps ahead. A lot of it is integration work: getting customer data onto the platform from new meters, sensors, and OEM devices. But it's broader than that. You'll also build things like energy-accounting and bill-credit reporting, behavioral demand-response programs that nudge end-customers via SMS instead of dispatching hardware, and the data pipelines and infrastructure those features ride on. When a customer brings something new, you don't ship a one-off — you design the reference architecture for things of that kind so the work for this customer becomes the template for the next several. Our customers share more of a common software stack than you'd expect, which is why this approach compounds. - Being the technical voice on new opportunities. When the commercial team is evaluating a deal that touches an unfamiliar data class — say a customer with geothermal asking if Texture can support it — you're the person who does the landscape analysis, identifies the handful of vendors and control mechanisms involved, and decides what we're looking at: a clean platform fit, a services-only engagement, or a new data class worth building reference architecture for. The commercial team is great at understanding customer need; you're the one who can technically assess whether and how Texture should support it. - Support the Head of Delivery + Operations in developing our services-only engagement menu based on feedback loops and technical delivery scope. - Translating between technical and non-technical worlds. Most of our utility customers don't have a deep software team. Explaining "what the system needs to do" to people who don't think in software is the actual job. This skill is essential. - Production ownership. What you ship is production code. You share on-call for the systems you build. You're responsible for speccing the work yourself. - Quarterly traveling to conduct in-person implementation and training workshops as needed. This role reports to the CTO, but is cross-functional and sits on our implementation team, which is led by the Head of Delivery + Operations. WHAT 90 DAYS LOOKS LIKE By the end of your first 90 days you should be ramped on Texture's platform and architecture, on the realities of utility and OEM customers, and on what they actually need from software like ours. You should be hopping on calls directly with the technical people on the customer side and driving toward outcomes — not just listening. And you should be 30–60 days into your first reference-architecture project: a new class of data we don't yet support, where you've done the landscape analysis, made the platform-fit-vs-services call, and started building. WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 10+ years of engineering. You've shipped systems that mattered, repeatedly. You don't need someone to tell you what "production-ready" means. - Operates independently. Comfortable owning ambiguity. You don't need a PM or a spec to make good decisions. - Strong communicator, especially to non-technical audiences. This is load-bearing for the role. - Breadth across the stack is a real plus. Backend integration work is the core, but the role naturally pulls in DevOps and infrastructure (we recently stood up a VPN tunnel and supporting infra to connect a customer's on-prem utility-scale battery system), data engineering (energy accounting and bill credits), and a bit of data science (assessing whether a behavioral demand-response push actually changed customer behavior). If you've worked across two or three of those areas, you'll be more effective here. None of them are requirements — judgment and willingness to learn matter more. - Curious about the energy grid. You don't have to come from energy — most of us didn't. But if the words "co-op utility," "DER," "interconnection queue," or "load shifting" make you want to learn more, you'll have fun here. Prior forward-deployed, solutions-engineering, or consulting experience is a plus, not a requirement. Two of our current engineers doing this kind of work hadn't done it before joining Texture and are doing a phenomenal job. STACK (WE USE IT; YOU DON'T NEED TO COME IN KNOWING IT) TypeScript, React, Go, Kafka, GraphQL federation, AWS, TimescaleDB. We've made the bet that great engineers can pick up languages and frameworks. What we hire for is judgment, ownership, and the ability to think across the stack. If you've never written Go and the rest looks familiar, we'll be fine. COMP AND LOGISTICS - Annual base salary: $225,000 – $245,000 - Equity: 0.08 – 0.12% common stock options (we'll walk through the specifics in our first conversation) - Benefits: medical, dental, vision (covered), 401(k), flexible PTO - Location: remote-first. We have a great office in NYC and a slight preference for candidates in/near NYC, but it's not a requirement. - Reports to: Victor Quinn, Co-founder and CTO HOW TO APPLY Send a resume, a LinkedIn, and a 200-word answer to this question: Describe a time you explained a technical system to a non-technical customer or stakeholder, and what you changed about your explanation when it wasn't landing. We read every application. We don't do take-home assignments. The loop: 1. 30-min intro with our CTO 2. 30-min with our Head of Delivery + Operations 3. Two technical-depth conversations with two of our senior engineers 4. A panel “customer simulation”: a live, simulated customer engagement with several members of the team, followed by their questions for you 5. Offer Typical timeline from first conversation to offer: 4 weeks. Texture is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital or partnership status, pregnancy or reproductive decisions, caregiver status, immigration or citizenship status, height, weight, unemployment status, genetic information, arrest or conviction record (consistent with the NYC Fair Chance Act), or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. If you need a reasonable accommodation to participate in the application or interview process, email careers@texturehq.com — we'll make it work.