Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
Founding forward deployed engineer at early-stage AI SaaS startup Clera: owns end-to-end customer deployments — mapping warehouse data to business concepts, building custom agent workflows and signals, and proving customer impact. Core tools are SQL, dbt, and applied statistics/ML. On-site in NYC, $180k–$250k.
- Compensation
- $180K–$250K / yr
- Location
- New York
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 3+ years
- Category
- Solutions engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- At least 3 years of experience in a technical, customer-facing role (forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, or software engineering with substantial customer exposure)
- Strong SQL and dbt skills, with deep familiarity navigating data warehouses and undocumented schemas
- Quantitative degree in statistics, mathematics, computer science, or comparable field, plus a foundation in data science or machine learning
- Applied statistics and modeling experience, including distributions, seasonality, validation design, and calibration
- Experience creating custom agent setups beyond default implementations and building analytical cases tied to customer outcomes
- Ability to resolve inconsistent business definitions through interviews and data validation, with attention to detail and comfort with ambiguity
Nice to have
- Founder experience or a non-traditional path into engineering
Full description
About the Role
Own customer deployments for an early-stage SaaS company, from understanding business goals and connecting to data through delivering a trusted system with measurable impact. The role brings together data engineering, applied AI, and customer success, while also building reusable tools and practices to improve future deployments.
What You'll Do
- Partner with revenue and operations leaders to understand business objectives and identify valuable problems to solve.
- Lead customer onboarding, scope data access, and map undocumented warehouse schemas to business concepts.
- Interview customer data and business teams to reconcile conflicting definitions and validate the resulting ontology.
- Build customer-facing signals and workflows, including custom agent configurations, and troubleshoot their outputs.
- Agree on success measures, analyze results, and build a credible evidence-based case for customer impact.
- Develop reusable validation frameworks, evaluation harnesses, and mapping tools to accelerate deployments.
What We're Looking For
- At least 3 years of experience in a technical, customer-facing role such as forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, or software engineering with substantial customer exposure.
- Strong SQL and dbt skills, with deep familiarity navigating data warehouses and undocumented schemas.
- A quantitative degree in statistics, mathematics, computer science, or a comparable field, plus a foundation in data science or machine learning.
- Applied statistics and modeling experience, including distributions, seasonality, validation design, and calibration.
- Experience creating custom agent setups beyond default implementations and building analytical cases tied to customer outcomes.
- Ability to resolve inconsistent business definitions through interviews and data validation, with careful attention to detail and comfort working through ambiguity.
- Founder experience or a non-traditional path into engineering is a plus.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary is $180,000 to $250,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in New York City, United States.