🚀 We're Hiring: Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) — AI / Agentic Software
📌 POSITION DETAILS
📍 Locations: | Toronto, Canada
🏢 Work Model: Hybrid
📅 Office Requirement: Minimum 3 days/week — 4 days preferred
💼 Employment: Full-time
🎯 Experience: 3–6 years
💰 Base Salary: $185,000+ Base
📈 Equity: Competitive equity
✈️ Travel: 2–3 days/week to portfolio company locations
🌎 Visa: H-1B transfers, OPT transfers & relocation supported
👥 Hiring: Multiple openings
About the Opportunity
We’re looking for Forward Deployed Engineers who can operate at the intersection of software engineering, AI, product, and business operations.
This is a highly hands-on, Palantir-style FDE opportunity within a software holding company. You will work directly with portfolio companies, understand their operational challenges, identify high-impact opportunities for AI and agentic automation, and then build, deploy, operate, and improve production systems end-to-end.
This is not a presentation-heavy solutions role. You will be expected to write production code, work directly with operators and executives, and take ownership of measurable outcomes.
What You'll Do
🔹 Embed with portfolio companies
- Work directly with portfolio companies to understand their operating models, workflows, and business priorities.
- Build relationships with GMs and operational leaders and quickly earn their trust.
- Identify the 2–3 highest-leverage workflows where agentic software can create meaningful impact.
🔹 Build and deploy AI-powered solutions
- Design and build the initial “wedge” for each deployment.
- Develop integrations, prompts, evaluations, UI surfaces, and agentic workflows.
- Launch the first production agentic loop using the organization’s core platform.
- Own the entire technical delivery cycle rather than handing work between specialized teams.
🔹 Operate systems after launch
- Monitor and tune deployed systems in production.
- Adjust autonomy levels and gating based on real-world performance.
- Track outcomes and continuously improve deployed workflows.
- Transition stable solutions to portfolio operations teams when appropriate.
🔹 Act as the technical partner to business leaders
- Serve as the technical face of the organization to portfolio company GMs.
- Translate ambiguous operational challenges into clearly scoped technical solutions.
- Set expectations, communicate trade-offs, and ensure stakeholders understand the value created by the system.
🔹 Build reusable organizational knowledge
- Bring lessons from deployments back to HQ.
- Identify recurring patterns across companies and verticals.
- Codify successful approaches into reusable playbooks.
- Help accelerate future deployments by turning individual solutions into repeatable systems.
Required Technical Skills
You should be comfortable owning a production system from backend through frontend and data layer.
Core requirements:
- Strong full-stack engineering capability.
- TypeScript or Python for backend development.
- Strong React experience.
- Strong SQL proficiency.
- Ability to independently own end-to-end technical delivery.
- Experience programming with Go and/or TypeScript.
- Experience working with modern AI development tooling and coding agents.
- Strong understanding of LLMs / foundation models and agentic workflows.
AI / Agentic Engineering Experience
A major requirement is experience building real production AI systems, not simply experimenting with AI or creating demonstrations.
Strong candidates will have experience with:
- Production LLM applications
- Agentic workflows
- AI-powered automation
- Evaluation frameworks / evals
- Autonomy gating
- Outcome tracking
- AI developer tools and coding agents
- Integrations and workflow automation
- Production deployment and post-launch iteration
We are specifically looking for engineers who have shipped AI/agentic software to external users.
Business & Operator Mindset
Technical ability alone isn't enough for this role.
You should be able to:
- Understand how a business operates.
- Read and interpret a P&L.
- Identify operational inefficiencies.
- Translate business problems into technical opportunities.
- Determine where AI can create the highest leverage.
- Work effectively with non-technical executives.
- Navigate ambiguity without requiring highly prescriptive requirements.
- Balance technical quality with business outcomes.
Ideal Background
The strongest candidates may come from backgrounds such as:
Forward Deployed Engineering
- Palantir-style FDE
- Deploy-and-operate engineering
- Customer-facing product engineering
Full-Stack / Product Engineering
- Senior full-stack engineer with direct customer exposure
- Product engineer who has shipped production AI systems
- Generalist engineer capable of owning an entire technical solution
High-Growth Startups
- Founding engineer
- Early-stage engineer
- Engineers who have operated with significant autonomy in high-growth environments
Business / Operator Exposure
- Experience working with PE-backed or portfolio companies
- Consulting environments
- Vertical SaaS
- Portco environments
- M&A integration or similar operational transformation work
Communication & Leadership
You should demonstrate:
- Strong executive presence.
- Polished communication with C-suite executives and GMs.
- Ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
- Strong stakeholder-management skills.
- Ability to build trust quickly with business operators.
- Comfort working in ambiguous, rapidly changing environments.
- Ability to independently drive projects from problem discovery through deployment and measurable outcomes.
What We're Looking For
✅ 3–6 years of relevant experience in full-stack, customer-facing software/product engineering or forward deployed engineering
✅ Production experience with LLMs / agentic software
✅ Strong TypeScript or Python
✅ React + SQL proficiency
✅ Full-stack ownership capability
✅ Experience with AI development tools and coding agents
✅ Customer-facing / embedded engineering experience
✅ Strong business and operator instincts
✅ Ability to work directly with executives and GMs
✅ Strong communication and executive presence
✅ Willingness to travel frequently to portfolio company locations
✅ Ability to work in a hybrid environment
Strong Candidate Archetypes
⭐ Founding Engineers
⭐ Early-stage startup engineers
⭐ Forward Deployed Engineers
⭐ Product Engineers with strong AI experience
⭐ Generalist Full-Stack Engineers
⭐ Engineers from high-growth technology companies
⭐ Customer-facing engineers who have owned production deployments
Tech Environment
Languages: TypeScript, Python, Go
Frontend: React
Data: SQL, Snowflake, Databricks, Apache Iceberg
AI: LLMs, Foundation Models, Agentic Workflows, Evals
Architecture: Event-driven systems
Development: AI-native development tools and coding agents
This Role Is NOT a Fit If...
❌ Your experience is limited to solutions engineering demos or prototypes without production ownership
❌ You have primarily worked as a backend-, frontend-, or mobile-only specialist and cannot own full-stack delivery
❌ You have not built or coded with modern AI development tools
❌ Your experience consists primarily of short consecutive stints
❌ You have not shipped production AI/agentic systems to real users
❌ You prefer narrowly defined requirements and do not enjoy ambiguous business problems
Compensation & Benefits
💰 Base Salary: $185,000+Base
📈 Competitive Equity
🧑 💻 Full-time employment
🏢 Hybrid work model
✈️ Frequent exposure to portfolio companies and high-impact deployments
🌎 Visa transfer and relocation opportunities available
Why This Opportunity?
This is an opportunity to work on high-impact AI deployments where engineering directly changes how businesses operate.
Instead of building isolated features, you will repeatedly:
Discover → Design → Build → Deploy → Operate → Measure → Scale
You’ll work closely with business operators, ship production AI systems, learn from each deployment, and help turn those learnings into reusable solutions across an entire portfolio.
📍 Locations
Toronto, Canada
Candidates should be comfortable with a hybrid schedule and 2–3 days per week of domestic travel to portfolio company locations.
How to Apply
If you're a Full-Stack Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, Product Engineer, Founding Engineer, or AI Engineer who has shipped production LLM/agentic systems and enjoys solving ambiguous business problems, we'd love to hear from you.
📩 Apply through LinkedIn or send your updated resume for consideration.
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