Forward Deployed Software Engineer

Job title: Forward Deployed Software Engineer

What we're looking for

Foundational skills (non-negotiable)

You need these because you are the last line of defense on what the AI produces. The bar is not “can write it from scratch in an interview.” The bar is “can read a 400-line AI-generated diff and spot the subtle bug in 90 seconds.” On this surface, that bug is often a matching rule that quietly gets it wrong, a migration that is unsafe against a live service, or a query that was fine on dev data and falls over in production.

• 5+ years shipping production software. Enough reps that you recognize bad code before you can articulate why.

• Real fluency in Python and TypeScript. Not “I can read it,” but fluent. You should be at home in a large, long-lived service and care about keeping it that way.

• Enough TypeScript and React to own a frontend. The platform ships internal applications that operations teams live in. You do not need to be a frontend specialist, but these are yours, and the people using them are your stakeholders.

• Strong SQL and relational database fundamentals. You can read a query plan, spot an N+1, know when a migration is unsafe at scale, and reason carefully about the joins and aggregations that decide what a record ends up being. You assume every table grows unbounded, because here it does.

• Experience building data-intensive applications. You have built systems that ingest, transform, and reconcile meaningful volumes of messy third-party data, and you care about getting it right rather than just moving it.

• Comfort with matching or deduplication problems. Record linkage, entity resolution, search relevance, identity matching — any domain counts. The interesting part is not the algorithm; it is knowing what a false match costs versus a missed one, and being able to defend where you drew the line.

• Experience running something where latency and availability mattered. A request path with a real deadline, an SLO you were accountable for, and the instincts that come with it: timeouts, caching, graceful degradation, kill switches, and careful rollouts.

• A correctness mindset. You instinctively reach for the checks, invariants, and audit trails that prove an answer is right rather than plausible. Here, “close enough” means someone gets an unexpected bill or gets turned away at the door.

• Systems thinking. You can sketch a service’s architecture on a whiteboard, identify the failure modes, and reason about blast radius — including the kind that spreads to every team that trusts your API.

• Production cloud experience (AWS, GCP, or equivalent).