Senior 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 Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, you lead our work with a client from the first call until their team runs on what we built. You’ll work from our London office, and often on site with our customers. Your afternoons overlap with the San Francisco morning.

What you’ll do

• Lead the discovery call, then build the first working version with our agents right after it.
• Sit with a manufacturer’s customer service team and see how orders come in and get confirmed before you change anything.
• Decide what we build first, what waits, and what we shouldn’t build at all.
• Ship order confirmations that run on their real orders, connected to the systems, inboxes and spreadsheets they already use.
• Build in the approval step. Agents prepare the work, and the client’s team approves what goes out.
• Run two or three clients at once, and keep each one’s operations lead up to date every week.
• Review the other engineers’ code and pair with them on hard integrations.
• Turn what works into pieces we reuse at the next company.

What we’re looking for

• You’ve shipped production software for five years or more, in Python or TypeScript, with SQL databases and APIs.
• You’ve led a project with a client or a business team, not just written the code for it.
• 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 a 20-year-old order system with a thin API or an inbox full of PDFs.
• You say no to the wrong first project, and you explain why in plain words.
• 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 a tech lead at a small company.

How we hire

• An intro call with Paul Sheridan, our founder and CEO.
• A working session where you scope and start a build with us, from a recording of a real discovery call.
• Meet the team.
• An offer.

Ciao is an equal opportunity employer.

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