Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Job description

Are you ready to build America’s energy future? Form Energy is an American manufacturing and energy technology company. We’re revolutionizing energy storage with cost-effective, multi-day technology designed to keep the electric grid secure and reliable, even during extended periods of stress. By strengthening the electric system and reimagining what’s possible, we’re giving clean energy a whole new form! In recent years, Form Energy has earned a number of accolades, including being named by TIME as a “Best Invention”, MIT Technology Review as a “Top Climate Tech Company To Watch”, and Fast Company as “One of the Next Big Things In Tech”. We are making rapid progress on our mission of delivering energy storage for a better world, and our team is growing just as rapidly to meet demand. We have signed contracts with leading electric utilities across the United States and production of our iron-air batteries is underway at our first high-volume manufacturing facility in West Virginia. Working for Form Energy is more than just a job, it’s a chance to be part of something extraordinary. And now - right as we significantly scale up battery manufacturing - might be the most exciting moment in the company’s history to join. We are assembling a team of highly talented and driven individuals across the country. Driven by our core values of humanity, excellence, and creativity, our team is determined to deliver on our mission and transform the energy landscape for the better. Feeling energized to make a meaningful impact on the world? Then keep reading - you’ve come to the right place. ROLE DESCRIPTION Form Energy is scaling on every axis at once — research, first-of-a-kind manufacturing, field deployment, and the business that runs behind them — and everywhere it scales, the same pattern repeats: brilliant people held back by fragile spreadsheets, manual handoffs, and software that doesn't exist yet. As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, you are the person we send at those problems. You will embed directly with the teams that do Form Energy's hardest work — scientists, engineers, operators, and business leaders — find the highest-leverage problems in their world, and build the software and AI that solves them. One quarter that might be a governed system of record replacing a load-bearing spreadsheet; the next, an AI agent that removes a week of manual toil; the next, a full-stack application that becomes the way a team works. You will not wait for perfect requirements or hand off to someone else to build. You go where the leverage is, ship, and stay with what you built as it matters more. This is a hands-on, senior individual-contributor role for someone who wants their work measured in problems solved, not tickets closed. This is a hybrid role, which will require working onsite from our office in Somerville, MA or Weirton, WV 3+ days per week. Relocation assistance is available. WHAT YOU'LL DO: - Embed with the teams you serve — across R&D, manufacturing, field and commercial operations, and the functions that support them — to understand their hardest problems firsthand, then design and build the software that solves them. - Hunt for leverage and act on it. Diagnose where a team is bottlenecked by missing software, manual process, or brittle tooling; make the call on what's worth building; and deliver it. Exercising judgment about what to build is as much of this job as building it well. - Spearhead the adoption of AI-driven automation in the functions you're embedded with — prototype and ship AI-enabled tools and agents, and drive real adoption with the people who will use them, all within the guardrails set by Form Energy's independent AI-governance function. - Own applications end to end: full-stack web applications (e.g., React / Next.js / TypeScript front ends, Python / FastAPI back ends, PostgreSQL) that become governed systems of record and decision-support tools — from data model through UI to production deployment and the users who depend on them. - Turn expert knowledge into durable software — take the spreadsheets, notebooks, and tribal knowledge that a team runs on and turn them into correct, maintainable, owner-attributed systems that the organization can trust and build on. - Build governed, traceable data models: versioned, append-only revision history with role-based access, so the assumptions and records that drive decisions are defensible and reconstructable. - Integrate with Form Energy's enterprise systems — the Snowflake data platform (read-only reference data), enterprise applications (Oracle, Arena, Jama, and others), and shop-floor / operational systems — respecting each system's authoritative boundary and never writing into systems you don't own. - Ship to production reliably: containerized services, CI/CD, and deployment on Form Energy's internal Kubernetes platform, with the observability, testing, and documentation needed to operate what you build. - Use AI aggressively as a force multiplier in how you build — AI-assisted and agentic development — to deliver more, faster, and at higher quality than a conventional engineering approach would allow. - Work in a fast, prototype-to-product style: get a working thing in front of users quickly, iterate beside them, and harden it into software the team can rely on — without accumulating unmanageable debt. WHAT YOU'LL BRING: - 8+ years building and shipping production software, with a track record of owning complex applications end to end. - Strong full-stack engineering skills: a modern web framework (React / Next.js / TypeScript or similar) and a production back-end language and framework (Python / FastAPI strongly preferred), with solid relational data modeling (PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy or equivalent). - AI as a force multiplier — required, not optional. A demonstrated command of AI-assisted and agentic development to build faster and better, and a track record of embedding AI / ML into applications and workflows to remove toil and create leverage. You should be energized by driving AI adoption in others, not only using it yourself. - Range and self-direction. A history of walking into unfamiliar domains, getting fluent fast, and shipping — comfortable being the sole or primary engineer on a system and owning the outcome, not just the code. - Ability to model a complex real-world domain in software — translating messy, expert-held knowledge into correct, maintainable systems — and the rigor to enforce invariants in the data layer, not only in application code. - Comfort working directly with non-engineering domain experts, embedded in their environment, translating ambiguous problems into shipped software — and the judgment to push back on the wrong thing and find the right one. - Solid engineering fundamentals: version control (Git), automated testing, CI/CD, and containerized deployment (Docker; Kubernetes a plus). - A pragmatic, ownership-minded bias toward shipping value quickly, paired with the taste to know when something needs to be built to last. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS: - Experience as a forward-deployed, solutions, or embedded engineer — working alongside the users of what you build rather than behind a backlog. - Experience building agentic or AI-automation systems for real operational workflows, and a point of view on where AI does and does not belong. - Experience with operations research / optimization or simulation (linear / mixed-integer programming, discrete-event simulation) — a strong plus for the harder modeling problems you'll meet. - Experience with enterprise data platforms (Snowflake, dbt) and the discipline of read-only vs. writable system boundaries. - Experience integrating with ERP (Oracle), PLM (Arena), MES, or requirements-management (Jama) systems. - Experience with enterprise identity / SSO (Microsoft Entra ID, OIDC). - Fluency in a technical domain adjacent to Form Energy's work — hardware, manufacturing, energy, scientific computing, or laboratory/industrial environments. - Experience in a high-growth technology or first-of-a-kind manufacturing environment. #LI-Hybrid Humanity is a cornerstone of Form Energy’s culture, and we make sure our compensation and benefits reflect that. Form Energy offers competitive salaries, stock options, and a holistic benefits package to ensure all employees have what they need to thrive while working here. When it comes to you and your family’s health, we cover 100% of medical, dental, and vision premiums for full-time employees - and 80% of healthcare premiums for dependents. This starts from day one. We also offer at least 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents (up to 20 weeks for birthing parents), and generous vacation policies to give employees time to recharge when needed. To build America’s energy future, we need everyone at the table. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply to our open jobs. If you may require reasonable accommodations to participate in our interview process, please contact accommodations@formenergy.com. Requests for accommodations will be treated with discretion. Form Energy is committed to maintaining the privacy of our applicants. Please be aware that we will never solicit sensitive personal information such as Social Security numbers or bank account details during the recruiting or hiring process.