Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Madison, WI
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Solutions engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Exceptional communication skills and the ability to build trust with partners.
- The curiosity and judgment to turn ambiguous business problems into concrete technical solutions.
- Strong ownership, self-direction, and comfort operating without a predefined playbook.
- A pragmatic mindset: you know when to configure, when to automate, when to build, and when the problem doesn’t require software at all.
- Confidence working across a broad range of systems, tools, and problem types.
- Substantial experience using AI agents in your day-to-day work.
- Experience using agentic development tools such as Claude Code to build useful applications, automations, or internal tools.
- The ability to measure outcomes and explain the value of what you delivered.
- Comfort working directly with customers and maintaining a high standard of responsiveness and professionalism.
- Clear, honest, upfront communication.
Full description
What We’re Building
Denari is building the modern software stack for accounting firms: an AI-powered platform that unifies client collaboration, document management, workflow automation, and financial insights in one place.
We’re a small, well-funded team with a built-in proving ground. Our sister company, Lucida Tax + Accounting, uses what we build every day, so we hear how a solution landed within hours of deploying it.
The Role
We’re hiring Denari’s first Forward Deployed Engineer to turn real partner problems into working solutions.
You’ll work directly with accounting firms to understand how they operate, identify their highest-value problems, and rapidly build, configure, and deploy solutions using the Denari platform. That could mean creating an agent skill in Denari Answers, configuring a document schema, designing a workflow, contributing a targeted improvement to the core product, or building a lightweight application alongside it.
This is not a traditional software engineering role, and formal software engineering experience is not required. We’re looking for a technically confident, resourceful builder who can use agentic development tools to solve real business problems. You should be able to think like an engineer—breaking down ambiguity, understanding systems, testing your work, and owning outcomes—without necessarily having followed a conventional engineering career path.
The objective isn’t simply to deliver what someone requests. It’s to understand what they actually need, determine the most pragmatic way to solve it, get the solution into their hands, and demonstrate that it created value.
As our founding FDE, you’ll also help define the function itself: how we scope engagements, prioritize opportunities, measure outcomes, monitor deployments, turn one-off work into reusable capabilities, and carry what we learn back into the product.
You’ll report directly to Denari’s CEO.
Your Impact Here Is Only Limited by Your Initiative
We are genuinely open to change. If you have an idea and you’re willing to put in the effort, we will back you—whether that’s a new partner solution, a reusable skill, a better deployment process, or a new way for the entire company to serve customers.
AI has also changed what counts as “hard.” Things that once required a traditional software development team can increasingly be built by resourceful people who understand the problem and know how to direct modern agentic tools.
You’ll have significant freedom in how you approach the work. With that freedom comes ownership: identifying what matters, making sound tradeoffs, communicating clearly, and following through after something ships.