Forward Deployed Engineer - Applied AI

About Wonderschool Wonderschool’s mission is to ensure every child has access to early childhood education that helps them realize their full potential. We empower small business owners, childcare providers, to launch and grow in-home programs through cutting-edge software, personalized coaching, and responsive support. We also partner with governments to modernize public childcare infrastructure. Our team is small, fast-moving, and deeply motivated by the impact we create in families and communities across the country. About the Role We are looking for a Forward Deployed AI Engineer to lead product development on some of the most strategically important initiatives at Wonderschool. You’ll spend your time working directly with customers (traveling as needed), uncovering pain points, and building AI-powered solutions that drive measurable impact across revenue, operational efficiency, and user experience. You’ll act like a founder inside the company: identifying problems, shipping code, driving adoption, and iterating quickly based on what you learn. This role blends engineering, product, operations, and business leadership, and is ideal for someone who has launched products, acquired users, and driven growth independently. You will work closely with our sales, onboarding, and account management teams to automate workflows, build better customer experiences, and unlock new grow [... source excerpt omitted ...] rld problems in the field, not from behind a desk. What You’ll Do Work directly with users and internal teams to identify high-leverage problems and ship product solutions. Write production code (approximately 50% of your time) and ship weekly improvements across the customer journey. Use tools like Widesurf, Cursor, and other AI accelerators to increase your velocity and quality of output. Build and deploy AI-powered tooling that eliminates manual effort and improves the experience for providers, parents, and government partners. Automate onboarding flows, proposal generation, reporting processes, and other operational workflows. Own full loops: talk to users, design solutions, w [... source excerpt omitted ...] ck loops, from discovery to deployment, and iterate rapidly. Internal teams rely on your tools to operate faster and with fewer resources. You’re moving fast, staying close to the customer, and operating with very little hand-holding. Who You Are A builder and founder at heart, you’ve started a company, built products that got users, or made revenue independently. Comfortable talking to users weekly and distilling insight into product decisions. Technical enough to ship production code on your own, experience with Python, JavaScript, or similar languages. Experienced using AI/LLMs and developer tools like Windsurf and Cursor to move faster and smarter. Business-minded, you’ve wo