Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Join Glean as a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer, where you'll have the autonomy and accountability of a founder. Your primary responsibility will be to discover and build Glean's next generation of product surfaces, working closely with Forward Deployed PMs and the C-suite of influential companies. You'll identify unsolved business problems, create new products to address them, and shape the future of Glean. This role requires a strong technical background, experience in product creation, and a deep understanding of enterprise systems.

You've shipped actual products that real people use, that drove real outcomes - and you want to do it at a higher level of ambition

USD 160,000 - 270,000

Responsibilities

• Identifying and building Glean's next generation of product surfaces, working closely with Forward Deployed PMs and C-suite executives.
• Leading deep opportunity discovery by understanding the business, identifying unsolved value, and forming strong hypotheses.
• Acting as a technical partner to the C-suite, earning trust at the highest levels of customer organizations, and explaining the technical aspects of the product.

Requirements

• You think like a founder. When you walk into a customer, you're curious about the business, digging into what's broken, and figuring out what to build that doesn't yet exist
• You're scrappy and resourceful, you move fast enough to learn, and you're as comfortable in a strategic discussion with a CEO as you are deep in a codebase
• Experience: 4+ years in technical roles with a track record of shipping production software. Former technical founders are strongly encouraged to apply
• 0-to-1 build track record: You've built production software from scratch in ambiguous environments. You can point to something that didn't exist before you showed up and is now used by real people at scale
• Customer instinct: You build trust quickly at every level of an organization, communicate with clarity, and know how to tailor your depth to the room

Willingness to travel: This role requires 25–50% travel

• Curiosity and scrappiness: You're driven to understand problems deeply before solving them, and resourceful enough to find a path forward when none is obvious
• Full-stack technical depth: Strong programming skills across the stack with a deep understanding of and experience with how enterprise systems actually work
• Builder's judgment: You know what's actually buildable, how long it will take, and when to simplify scope to get something real into production faster. You spot problems early and solve them independently
• Business acumen: You can walk into a customer, identify where the real problems are, and connect that diagnosis to a product hypothesis - without being handed a brief
• Production AI experience: You've shipped AI-powered solutions in the real world - prompt engineering, agent development, evaluation frameworks, deployment at scale. Not just prototypes
• Experience as a founder, at a top-tier technology company, or in a forward deployed engineering role
• A technical degree in CS, engineering, math, or a related field

Preferred

• Experience driving technology adoption inside large enterprises
• Deep familiarity with LLMs, retrieval systems, and evaluation frameworks