Forward Deployed Engineer

About Beacon Software Beacon is acquiring and operating a portfolio of vertical SaaS companies. Most private equity firms scale by adding people. We are building Beacon to scale by adding software. The thesis is simple: portfolio operations, value creation, and deal sourcing are bottlenecked by human attention, and an agentic operating system can lift that ceiling by an order of magnitude. We are building that system. It has two pieces. A sensing layer is a cross-portfolio data lake on open table formats with a feature store on top that makes the data agent-readable. An action layer runs workflows across three domains: how we run the portfolio, how we grow the portfolio, and how we acquire into it. Underneath both sits a feedback loop that captures every action and outcome with stable identifiers. Beacon has raised $550M+ from investors including General Catalyst, Lightspeed, D1 Capital, CPMG, and the family offices of the founders of Stripe, DoorDash, and Ramp. About the Role Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) are the engineers who go where the work is. You will be embedded with one or two portfolio companies at a time — sitting with the GM, the operators, and the customer success lead — figuring out where the leverage is, and shipping agentic software directly into their operation. The platforms exist. You are the person who turns them into outcomes on a specific business [... source excerpt omitted ...] o reusable playbooks that ship to every other portco in the same vertical. This is not a consulting role. We ship software, not slides. The deliverable is a running system. What You'll Do Embed deeply with portcos. Spend the first few weeks at a new portco understanding the operating model from the inside: what the GM cares about, where revenue actually comes from, where the team’s time goes, where the system is leaking. Earn the trust of the operators before you start changing things. Find the leverage. Identify the 2–3 workflows where agentic software will meaningfully change the trajectory of the business — churn-save, pricing experiments, lead enrichment, support deflec [... source excerpt omitted ...] d, SQL fluently, comfortable in someone else’s codebase within a day. You do not need to be a specialist in any one stack. You need to be the person who can land the whole thing. Customer-obsessed. You like being in the room with the operator, the GM, the customer success lead. You take the problem they actually have, not the problem they described. You are not interested in building platforms that no one uses. High autonomy, low ego. You will be the only Beacon engineer on the ground at a portco most of the time. You need to make calls without a committee, defend them when challenged, and change your mind when you are wrong. Comfortable with LLM-native engineering. You have s