Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

About Founders Careers: 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 candidates will typically have:

• Strong software engineering fundamentals
• 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.