First ResonanceBuilds what the customer runs
Forward Deployed Software Engineer (San Francisco)
San Francisco, CAOn-site
$145,000–$175,000
Published · Updated
Pay not postedSan Francisco, CAOn-site
Own production delivery of customer-specific applications from validated prototype through launch and iteration, spanning frontend, backend, data, integrations, LLM orchestration, and operations.
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Not posted
Median $190K
Typical senior FDE payMiddle 50% of 1,789 postings$160K–$220KBuilds what the customer runs
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Posted by ciridae on
You turn a compelling prototype into the production system a customer actually runs on. Full-stack, at a pace that is not normal. This is a high-agency engineering role with unusual variety: every engagement brings a different industry, workflow, and technical problem. Our Forward Deployed Engineers go into the field, learn how the business works, establish the vision, and build the first version. You take that context and make it real: well-architected, reliable software that handles messy data, demanding users, and everything production exposes. While the FDE leads the customer relationship and communicates the vision, most of your time is spent building.
What you own. The application from validated prototype through launch and iteration: frontend, backend, data models, integrations, LLM orchestration, testing, deployment, and the operational plumbing that keeps it running. You translate field context into technical decisions and make complex AI systems intuitive for nontechnical users. This ownership includes identifying gaps, making architecture decisions, pushing back when solutions will not survive production. What you learn on one engagement becomes a reusable component, pattern, or capability that makes the next deployment faster
What you bring. Deep full-stack engineering fundamentals. You have shipped production software across React and TypeScript on the frontend and Python, APIs, and Postgres on the backend. You can design clean data models, debug across the stack, and reason clearly about security, performance, reliability, and maintainability. You have production experience with LLM-powered applications and practical opinions about agents, RAG, tool use, evaluations, observability, and designing around non-deterministic behavior. You use AI deeply in your engineering workflow to build, debug, and iterate faster. You pair urgency with a high bar for code quality and production readiness.
Level. We expect roughly 3+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated ownership of complex systems end-to-end. Technical depth and independent execution matter more than an exact number of years.
First ResonanceBuilds what the customer runs
San Francisco, CAOn-site
$145,000–$175,000
Pay not posted
Pay not posted
$215,000–$300,000
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