Forward-Deployed Engineer

Office Locations: East Coast; San Francisco (Hybrid); San José HQ (Hybrid) SoCal, West Coast, Texas, Arizona Remote work: Tessera is a remote company. Travel: Required for customer engagements, with a wide variance per customer, of up to 50% Deployment at Customer Site: Up to 2-3 days a week at customer site depending on customer and phase of engagement Relocation stipend: Provided About Tessera Labs As a Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE) at Tessera, you will drive how global enterprises deploy AI at scale. You will own our most strategic customers and deployments, building and operationalizing AI automation in a category with no established playbook — a role where outcomes are asymmetric and a single person can be decisive. You are the technical arm of our pre-sales and post-sales motions, embedding in Fortune 500 customers whose expectations were set by a world before AI. The solutions you build and ship will replace and augment mission-critical workflows in production that previously consumed thousands of human hours and added months or years to billion-dollar project timelines. Tessera Forward-Deployed Engineers are technical AI engineers with strong product intuition. You will develop relationships with top decision-makers at the world's most influential companies, and you'll rapidly learn the architectural intricacies sustaining global corporations. You'll own buildi [... source excerpt omitted ...] tion you'll ask is not how to deploy, but what to build and deploy: as a frontline engineer, you carry the highest signal of how the product is moving and where it ought to go, so you will be expected to drive and shape our product strategy. What makes this not a consulting role: we are a product company. Our business model drives outcomes through a platform, not people. Your ownership will span customer outcomes and product strategy across both short- and long-term horizons: ship the customer outcome in front of you now, and shape the product's capabilities for the long term. As a Forward-Deployed Engineer, you'll constantly balance business tradeoffs: win enterprise revenue b [... source excerpt omitted ...] ing long-term leverage; go deep into customer workflows but don't become a consultant. Ultimately, your responsibility is to drive revenue, holding both horizons in mind at once. You will sit at the intersection of GTM, Product, Engineering, and Center of Excellence, owning engagements from pre-deployment through maturity and beyond, and partnering closely with Deployed Strategists in customer deployments. This role is ideal for engineers and ex-founders who thrive under ambiguity and pair strong technical chops with intuitive people skills. Deployed Engineers are proactive problem-solvers with a keen ability to see around corners. Responsibilities Write code and build produc