Forward Deployed Engineer

The Job

Be SageOx's builder at the customer boundary - the first line of partnership for every team we serve. Embedded where customers live (their Slack, their office), this engineer turns friction into shipped product: educating teams, unlocking value, and building the fixes and features that customer experience demands. Customers reach daily-active use because this person exists - and the roadmap stays directly aligned to customer needs because of the feedback they synthesize.

What You'll Actually Do

• First line of engagement: Live where customers live; catch issues as they arrive; triage everything; fix some directly and escalate only what genuinely needs deeper core-engineering context - with a clean repro and context. Today the engagement surface is shared Slack channels - right for now, while we're under ~30 teams and know every one by name - but over time it may shift. This person helps identify the best way to stay engaged and meets customers where they are.
• Onboard new customers onsite: Run onboarding in person at the customer's office - setup, workflow design with their team, first-value moments witnessed and secured.
• Build on the core product. This is not a support role with a code editor nearby - this person IS a builder. They own customer-reported items end-to-end: bug to merged PR, small feature to shipped. The customer-reported queue is their backlog into the core codebase, and their commits are how customer pain becomes product, fast.
• Create value, not just fixes: Design solutions and workflows with customer teams, educate users into power users, and turn recurring questions into reusable teaching - docs, how-tos, office hours. The job is measured in value unlocked, not tickets closed.
• Own the signal loop: A daily and weekly customer digest for the whole team - issues, trends, feature friction, use-case patterns, verbatim quotes. This is how the team stays connected to customer truth without carrying the response traffic; it's a first-class deliverable, not a side note.
• Shorten time-to-value every week: Each onboarding and each recurring issue should produce a fix, a doc, or a product suggestion that makes the next customer faster.

Who We're Looking for

• Profile in one line: An engineer who chooses people - a builder with real technical chops who discovered they're happiest at the customer boundary: sharing, educating, helping, unlocking value.
• Experience: Software engineer who migrated toward customers, or a solutions/support/sales engineer at a dev-tool or infra startup who ships fixes themselves. Early-startup exposure strongly preferred over big-co support orgs.
• Technical bar: Debug an integration end-to-end and ship small features - not only bug fixes - unsupervised. Fast, pragmatic; moves independently but knows when to flag, ask for help, or request review.
• Cultural fit: Energized (not drained) by customer pings and onsite visits; patient teacher; writes clearly - the digest and the onboarding materials are writing deliverables, and good ones compound: every improvement lets more teams self-onboard or self-unblock, easing this person's own load over time; embraces transparency; focused on making the team win.
• AI-native: Comfortable with agent workflows and AI tooling; they'll be teaching customers to work with AI coworkers, so they must work that way themselves.
• Logistics: Onsite onboarding makes travel a real constraint - genuinely travel-willing.

Location - Seattle, in Person

• Same as every role here.
• In person, five days a week, in Seattle.
• FDE travel to customer sites happens occasionally - think a few days a quarter, not permanent road-warrior life.

One narrow exception: Bay Area-based candidates we can get to Seattle at least two weeks a month, through end of 2026.

How We Hire

• No traditional interviews.
• We'll clear an initial assessment and invite you to a work trial: 3-5 days in Seattle, working on something real alongside the team, the way the team actually works.
• Most of what matters shows up there faster than any interview loop could reveal.

• SAGEOX TODAY $15M seed led by Canaan, with A.Capital Pioneer Square Labs, and Founders' Co-op.
• Founded by Ajit Banerjee (AWS EC2/EBS, XetHub > Hugging Face), Ryan Snodgrass (early Amazon, Kindle/AWS-scale cloud systems), and Milkana Brace (EVP Product at Remitly).
• Small on purpose.
• More about the team >

Compensation

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. We'll talk specifics once we know it's a real mutual fit.