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Forward Deployed Research Engineer

Updated

Pay not postedSan Francisco, CAOn-site

This onsite San Francisco role embeds with enterprise customers to turn large APIs into agent-usable tool surfaces, owning engagements from discovery through production release.

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View posting at Composio

At a glance

Posted base pay

Not posted

The work

Builds what the customer runs

Balance

  1. Mostly building
  2. Mixed
  3. Mostly pre-sales or support

Project stages

  1. Pre-sales (not covered)
  2. Proof of concept (not covered)
  3. Implementation
  4. Operations
Coding
Writes production code
Builds for
External customers
Level
Senior
Role
Technical lead

What they ask for

Tools

  • OAuth 2.0
  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • MCP
  • tool-use evaluations
  • customer SDKs
  • API integrations

Less common in FDE jobs

  • On-site37%
  • Individual contributor or manager: Technical lead47%

Share of US FDE postings that state each fact.

The job description from Composio

Posted by Composio on

At Composio, we are building infrastructure that allows agents to communicate with the tools you use for work including Github, Gmail, Notion, Salesforce, etc. We are a small team of engineers wrangling problems from context to search, that help us provide the most capable bridge between your agents and your tools. We raised a $25M Series A from Lightspeed with angels like Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel), Dharmesh Shah (CTO of Hubspot), and Gokul Rajaram. We've 3x'd our ARR this year, and our customers range from your friends in the YC batch to Wabi, Glean, Zoom and many more.

the action layer for AI agents is the least-solved part of the stack. this role works at that frontier: embedded with the customers pushing hardest, turning open research questions into tools their agents use, shipping the code yourself.

THE FRONTIER YOU'LL WORK ON

  • turning an 800-endpoint enterprise API into a tool surface a model can navigate. tool granularity, composite tools, description engineering, scope design. no textbook exists; you write it in production.
  • building the evals that tell us an agent picked the right tool. the field has no good answer; your harnesses become ours.
  • working directly with the engineers defining what agents can do, and feeding what breaks back into the product.

WHAT YOU'LL DO?

  • own enterprise accounts end to end: discovery, spec, implementation, QA, release.
  • ship production code in our toolkit monorepo and customer SDKs: custom and composite tools, schema and scope changes, per-customer patches.
  • turn large enterprise APIs into agent-usable tool surfaces, and build the evals that prove the model picks the right tool.
  • QA toolkits, and build the harnesses that make QA repeatable instead of artisanal.
  • run weekly customer syncs: the summaries, ETAs, and escalations that keep an engagement coherent.
  • operate per-customer tool-patching as self-service, not escalation.
  • dogfood Composio on your own workflows.

"MUST HAVES"

if you are very good, nothing is a must per-se

  • applied integration engineering
  • you ship production code, not demos.
  • you live in enterprise APIs and auth: OAuth 2.0, consent models, scope design, multi workspace tokens. you know the edge cases from scars.
  • you make architecture calls under pressure and defend them to a customer's principal engineers.
  • customer technical ownership
  • you've taken a named enterprise account from first call to live.– you turn vague asks into specs, and push back when the ask is wrong.
  • ai native
  • you have built with the language models.
  • you have built for the language models, and treat the agent-tool interface as an open research problem.
  • taste - finger feel for good developer experience.
  • typist - you explain complex ideas clearly under deadline.
  • human - you build trust and admit what you don't know.

OPTIONAL

  • years of Python in production (Typescript a plus).
  • API platform, iPaaS, or integration-heavy background.
  • prior FDE / solutions-architect role selling to big tech.
  • frontier output: MCP servers, tool-use evals, agent-tooling writeups.

View posting at Composio

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Pay and conditions

Posted pay
Pay not posted
Location
San Francisco, CA
Work arrangement
On-site
Employment type
Full-time