Context
Inku is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer. Someone who gets our platform live at a client fast, sits with their team while they use it, and turns what they see into working changes in the product, within days, not release cycles.
Inku is a brand intelligence platform. Our Brand Engine turns a brand's identity, visual grammar and product rules into structured context that our agents use to plan, generate and evaluate creative work. It works. The question at every client is how to make it work for them, in their systems, with their people, and that's where this role lives.
The Role
As a Forward Deployed Engineer you are the technical owner of an Inku deployment from first contact to sustained use. You work inside customer environments, build what is needed to make the platform valuable there, and feed what you learn back into the product.
Two things matter most: speed of implementation and speed of feedback.
You prototype directly in the platform and the codebase, put it in front of the client's team, learn what works, and ship the next iteration. The loop between a client's reaction and a change in the product should be measured in days.
The work follows a consistent arc:
Understand the environment. Spend time with the customer's marketing and creative teams to understand how work actually happens, which brand rules are enforced in practice, and where the platform can create measurable value first.
Connect the systems. Build the integrations that bring their data into Inku, from warehouses and asset management systems to collaboration tools. Map their vocabulary onto our ontology, and flag where the ontology needs to change.
Prototype and build fast. Deliver applications, agent workflows and internal tooling on top of the platform, starting with the smallest version that lets the client react. Define where agents operate autonomously, where they propose and a human approves, and how they escalate when they cannot resolve something.
Gather feedback and iterate. Work with users and stakeholders to establish trust and make success measurable. Watch what is used, retire what is not, and bring what you learn straight back into the platform as working changes. Real behaviour beats stated preference.
Generalise the result. Decide what remains customer-specific, what becomes a reusable pattern or domain package, and what belongs in the core platform and SDK. This is the part that compounds. Each deployment should make the next one faster.
Requirements
- At least 2-3 years of professional experience in software engineering, applied AI, product engineering or forward deployed engineering. Experience as a founder, early engineer or technical lead is a strong advantage.
- Strong engineering fundamentals with full-stack range. Python as a primary language, working proficiency in TypeScript, and experience deploying and operating services on cloud infrastructure without a dedicated platform team.
- Practical experience building with LLM APIs and agent frameworks in production, beyond prototypes.
- The ability to work independently in an unfamiliar codebase and reach informed questions quickly.
- A bias for prototyping: you would rather ship a rough version today and refine it from feedback than spend a week making it complete.
- Comfort in customer-facing work: running sessions with non-technical stakeholders, translating ambiguity into scope, and challenging a request when it does not serve the outcome.
- Working proficiency in English. Dutch is an advantage given our client base.
Advantageous
- Experience with graph databases, knowledge graphs or semantic modelling.
- Background in marketing technology, creative production or brand systems.
- Experience with on-premise or customer-hosted deployments and the security requirements that come with them.
What to expect
We are a small engineering team, so scope is broad and ownership is direct. You will work across the graph, the agent layer, integrations and infrastructure rather than within a single specialism, and you will work directly with our CTO on architecture and with customers on outcomes.
Roughly half of the role is spent outside the codebase, with users and stakeholders. The other half is spent moving fast inside it, prototyping and shipping what those conversations call for. Requirements will frequently be incomplete and systems will frequently be undocumented. That is the nature of the work rather than a temporary condition.
We work together on site several days per week and do not currently hire for fully remote positions.
What we offer
A competitive compensation package, including a mobility budget or company car, insurance and meal vouchers, matched to demonstrated expertise and impact. And a role with unusual scope: a platform that is still early enough for your decisions to shape its direction, applied to brands with real production demands.