Forward Deployed Engineer (Founding Customer Engineer)

About the role

This is a founding, first-non-founder hire at a seed-stage AI SaaS startup building conversational agents that run automated product demos for B2B go-to-market teams. You'll own every customer relationship and build the playbook for scaling from a small initial customer base to thousands. The role sits at the intersection of technical implementation, customer success, and product feedback - working directly with the CTO to shape what gets built.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end customer relationships from onboarding through ongoing success, including improving demo performance and driving adoption
• Teach and coach AI agents on product positioning, buyer personas, pricing conversations, and sales workflows
• Serve as the voice of the customer - analyze conversation logs and feedback to identify patterns and surface insights for the product team
• Translate customer feedback into actionable product feature requests in close collaboration with engineering and the CTO
• Build automation workflows and systems (scripting, APIs, low-code/no-code tools) to help the customer engineering function scale efficiently
• Define and document the customer engineering playbook from scratch

Requirements

• Required
• 0-3 years of experience in a customer-facing technical role in SaaS (e.g., solutions engineer, customer engineer, technical account manager)
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; comfortable leading product demos and customer onboarding sessions
• Hands-on experience building automation workflows to scale customer-facing tasks (scripting, APIs, or low-code/no-code tools)
• Experience analyzing customer feedback and conversation logs to identify patterns and inform product decisions
• Ability to work cross-functionally and translate customer needs into concrete product improvements
• Experience coaching or configuring AI agents for sales contexts - defining tiers, personas, and pricing conversations is a plus
• Requirements & Eligibility
• Must be authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship
• Must be able to work on-site in San Francisco, CA
• Compensation & Benefits
• Base salary: $140,000 - $185,000 USD annually
• Early employee equity opportunity at a funded, early-stage AI startup
• Location
• On-site in San Francisco, CA . Remote and hybrid arrangements are not available for this role.

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