Founders Careers works with startups and technology companies to identify high-quality talent for high-impact roles.
As AI companies move from models and prototypes to real-world deployments, there is growing demand for engineers who can work across customers, product and engineering - understand the problem, build the solution and get it running in production.
Founders Careers is building a highly curated network of India-based engineers for FDE / Applied AI opportunities with high-growth startups and technology companies, including global teams.
We’re starting with a small group and will selectively speak with engineers whose experience strongly matches this kind of work.
By Forward Deployed Engineer - we mean
You should be comfortable getting close to the actual business problem, figuring out what needs to be built and owning the solution end-to-end.
That could involve:
- Working directly with customers, founders or business teams
- Understanding ambiguous or poorly defined problems
- Translating business problems into technical solutions
- Building and iterating prototypes quickly
- Developing production-grade applications
- Integrating APIs, databases and existing enterprise systems
- Building with LLMs, agents and applied AI systems
- Deploying, debugging and improving solutions in production
- Making product and engineering decisions independently
- You don't need to have "FDE" in your title
You may currently be working as a:
Forward Deployed Engineer / Applied AI Engineer / AI Engineer / Founding Engineer / Backend / Full-stack Engineer / Solutions Engineer / Customer Engineer / Implementation Engineer / Technical Consultant
What matters more than the title is the kind of problems you have solved.
What we're looking for
- Strong programming skills (Python required; familiarity with JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, or similar a plus).
- Experience building and shipping real products or systems
- Hands-on experience with LLMs, AI applications or agentic systems
- Strong backend, full-stack or systems integration experience
- Ability to move quickly from problem > prototype > production
- Ability to work directly with technical and non-technical stakeholders
- High ownership and strong problem-solving ability
Experience working at startups, with enterprise customers, or in customer-facing technical roles is a strong advantage.