Forward Deployed Engineer

Ambitus works with enterprises and frontier AI labs to improve how AI performs in professional settings, starting with engineering and life sciences. The mission is to automate white-collar work at firms where the gains show up in daily life, in physical engineering and life sciences, more than in purely digital tools. Customers are mid-market enterprises doing more than $50 million in revenue, and frontier labs. Ambitus is already working with three of the leading labs. People from Ambitus sit inside enterprises and automate workflows. On the back end, an automated eval platform builds evals for those custom automations, which shows where models fail and feeds the reinforcement-learning environments Ambitus sells to the labs. The loop is to embed with a company, find the failures, sell the data that improves the models, then expand inside that enterprise.

Ambitus raised a $4 million seed from Neo, with angels from OpenAI, Thinking Machines, and Summit Partners. It is at an eight-figure run rate and growing fast. The team is 6 people, going to 8, with an end-of-year goal around 15. A co-founder was early at Mercor, and the founding group includes Stanford and BCG backgrounds. Seed stage, about 1 to 10 people, founded in 2026, in San Francisco.

Ambitus is hiring a forward deployed engineer to build and deploy workflow automations inside enterprises. You work with customer teams to see how a process runs today, find where automation helps, and ship systems that hold up in production. You pair with the strategic project leads, who own the customer relationship and the program plan, on technical design, evaluation, and deployment. The default is an enterprise contract already in place. You handle execution: meet the people who do the work, shadow them, build the automation, deploy it, and oversee rollout. A CAD modeling automation is the kind of engagement they mean.

These are contract engagements, closer to consulting than to a single product. There is downtime between contracts. They want someone with enough agency to use that time well, especially on go-to-market. Sales is founder-led today. This is not a sales seat. The team is too small for a dedicated sales team, so the right person will upsell a current customer into a second phase, or help the founders by using their own network, such as private equity firms or people they already know at target companies. Ideally you can be trained to run a call on your own and pitch the Ambitus vision and a contract. Being personable matters, because you should be in front of customers without a founder checking every email or sitting in every meeting.

You map existing processes with the strategic project leads and scope the automation: success criteria, data access, and constraints. You build evaluations that measure whether a workflow holds up on the customer's real data and edge cases, before and after go-live. You deploy automations in customer environments, watch performance, and fix production failures. You turn recurring needs into reusable platform capabilities with the platform engineers.

Bar: about 1 to 4 years. You ship production software, ideally in a customer-facing or consulting engineering role. You have been a forward deployed engineer, or you held a technical role at a company that has them. Forward deployed work at another AI startup is the most transferable. The companies they name are Netic, Decagon, and Poetic, and similar enterprise-AI teams with that motion. You learn an unfamiliar process fast and turn it into a technical plan. You can test systems whose outputs are hard to verify, and you know when something is ready for production. You communicate with technical and non-technical people, including when requirements are still forming. AI agents, enterprise systems integration, or workflow automation in engineering or life sciences are bonuses. Real forward-deployed experience, comfort in front of enterprise stakeholders, using downtime to drive an upsell, and specific judgment on when to ship are green flags. No customer-facing experience, needing fully scoped work, staying passive in downtime, or not being personable enough to meet customers without a founder is a miss.

In office in San Francisco. Visa sponsorship is limited. Equity is about 0.1% to 0.5%. A free gym membership, health, dental, and vision, and a $1,000 a month meals stipend. Posted work intensity is 9-9-6. The process is a one-hour whiteboard, a one-hour open-ended coding problem, a one-day on-site, then an offer.