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, design and ship new products, and scale what works. This role requires strong programming skills, business acumen, and a track record of shipping production software.

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.
• 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
• 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

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
• Full-stack technical depth: Strong programming skills across the stack with a deep understanding of and experience with how enterprise systems actually work
• 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
• 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

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

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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

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

Pay

USD 160,000 - 270,000