AI Forward Deployed Engineer

Why this role exists

Scientists spend a staggering amount of time wrangling data instead of running experiments. We build the AI-native platform that changes that: the system of record and the intelligence layer for R&D labs formulating everything from next-gen batteries to sustainable materials to alternative proteins. Our software doesn't just store lab data, it designs experiments, recommends formulations, surfaces insights, and automates the busywork that stands between a researcher and their next discovery.

This role is the bridge between Sales and Customer Success. You own the moment that makes or breaks every customer relationship: the initial deployment. When a new customer says yes, you're the person who takes them from a signed deal to a live, adopted, referenceable account - running discovery, designing the solution, and executing it hands-on. You're the connector that ensures what Sales promised is exactly what the customer gets, and that Customer Success inherits an account that's already succeeding.

What you'll do

You'll own the full arc of a new deployment, end to end:

• Discovery. Sit shoulder-to-shoulder with scientists at some of the most demanding labs in the world. Go deep on their chemistry, their workflows, and their actual problems, asking the first-principles questions that pin down what success really looks like before a single thing gets built.
• Solution design. Translate the messy reality of a customer's science into a concrete architecture: configurations, data models, integrations, migrations, and the AI agents and skills that will automate the work they used to do by hand.
• Execution. You'll ship real software into customers' hands in days and weeks, not quarters or years (!), standing up a tenant, co-creating with subject matter experts at the customer, and wiring up agentic workflows using the most capable AI tooling available.

You'll also be a tight feedback loop for the Product team. When you hit a gap, you'll characterize it precisely, weigh a custom config against a real product improvement, and push the platform to absorb the pattern so the next ten customers never feel it, then hand the account to Customer Success already set up to thrive.

Who you are

This is a rare combination, and that's the point. You bring deep scientific domain expertise and pair it expertly with the latest technology.

• You have real depth in a scientific field - chemistry, materials science, food science, or an adjacent R&D discipline - ideally at the bench. You understand how scientists actually work because you've been one. 
• You intimately know the legacy software scientists have been stuck with - paper lab notebooks, legacy ELN and LIMS, XLS, homegrown software - and all the weaknesses, gotchas and frustrations that have historically come with them.
• You're genuinely technical and build with the frontier: you've worked hands-on with LLMs and agentic frameworks - prompt/skill design, tool use, evals, feedback loops - and you have opinions about where they shine and where they don't. You generate production-quality software solutions and are comfortable across the stack.
• You thrive in front of customers. You can run a technical discovery session, pin down real requirements, and make a scientist feel deeply understood.
• You're energized by ambiguity and speed, and would rather ship something real and iterate than wait for the perfect spec. 

The magic is in the intersection: someone who can talk experimental design with a materials scientist in the morning and architect an AI agent to automate their workflow in the afternoon.

Why this is the frontier

This is genuinely as close to the leading edge of the technology industry as you can get. AI is rewriting what software can do, and applying it to real scientific R&D - where the stakes are discovery itself - is one of the most consequential places to be doing that work. You won't be reading about what's coming; you'll be building it, using tooling that didn't exist last year to move at a pace that compounds every week.

Your work is visible and high-impact from day one. You'll see a customer go from hopeful to happy and genuinely referenceable because of something you designed and built. You'll help define what "forward deployed" even means at a company inventing the category. And you'll be surrounded by people - Sales, Customer Success, Product and Engineering - rowing hard in the same direction toward the same goal: making researchers dramatically more productive.

If you want to sit at the intersection of deep science and frontier AI, close to the people your work helps, we'd love to talk.

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