Forward Deployed Engineer

Ciao is a small team of engineers. We build bespoke software and AI for companies with $50M to $500M in revenue. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you’re the engineer in the room with the client’s team. You’ll work from our San Francisco office, and often on site with our customers.

What you’ll do

• Join the discovery call, then build the first working version with our agents right after it.
• Sit with a distributor’s inside sales desk and see how quotes really get made before you change anything.
• Ship a first version of same-day quotes that runs on their real quotes, not a demo.
• Connect it to the ERP, CRM, inboxes and spreadsheets they already run on.
• Build in the approval step. Agents prepare the work, and the client’s team approves what goes out.
• Stay until the team uses it every day, then start on their next process.
• Write up what to reuse next time, and where the agents fell short.

What we’re looking for

• You write production code across the stack, in Python or TypeScript, with SQL databases and APIs.
• You’ve built with LLMs past the demo: tool use, retrieval, evals and knowing when a person needs to step in.
• You’ve connected to messy business systems, like an ERP with a thin API or an inbox full of PDFs.
• You can turn a vague problem into a plan. You say so early when the plan needs to change.
• You explain things plainly to a dispatcher, an operations manager or a CFO.
• You care more about whether people use it than whether it’s clever.

Nice to have

• You’ve worked in or built for distribution, manufacturing, construction, field services, trucking or professional services.
• You’ve been a founder or an early engineer at a small company.

How we hire

• An intro call with Paul Sheridan, our founder and CEO.
• A working session where you build something real with us.
• Meet the team.
• An offer.

Ciao is an equal opportunity employer.

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