Forward Deployed Engineer

About Comena

Comena builds AI agents for industrial distributors and manufacturers to automate their order processing from e-mail inbox to ERP. At distributors across the US and Germany alone, there are 4 million sales and procurement people stuck in manual workflows between inbox and ERP. We want to automate this work and liberate these people to work on more meaningful things.

We’re part of the YC S25 batch - the most selective batch in YC history. We recently raised a seed round from top Silicon Valley investors, and are serving customers across US and Germany.

About the role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will be one of our very first hires. In this role, you will combine strong technical abilities with excellent communication skills, working directly with customers to ensure they maximize the value of Comena’s AI platform. You will be involved in onboarding, implementation, and ongoing support, while also contributing to product development and innovation.
We move at startup speed: You’ll deploy features rapidly, learn on the fly, and help define our engineering culture and architecture.

Key responsibilities

• Customer onboarding and implementation: Lead the full implementation lifecycle, including configuring, testing, and deploying AI agents. This involves integrating the platform with client data (e.g. product catalog) and systems (e.g. ERP) and understanding clients’ custom workflows. You'll also adapt backend logic and user interface to meet client requirements.
• Collaboration: Work closely with the founders and customers to translate customer needs into technical solutions. Provide hands-on technical guidance and training to drive customer adoption and success.
• Build full-stack features: Develop and ship product functionality using our Typescript frontend and Python backend. Take features from idea to production, including UI, business logic, and cloud services.

We’re looking for someone that …

• Has high agency, can operate independently and takes ownership
• Has excellent communication skills and enjoys working with non-technical stakeholders
• Ships full-stack products quickly without compromising on code quality
• Loves startups and running together to make something great happen
• Wants to work very hard beyond traditional 9-5 hours

Tech Stack

We work with Python (Django), Typescript, Postgres, and the latest LLMs.

Why join us?

• Your work will directly impact workers and companies around the world, to make global supply chains run smoothly.
• We’re keeping our team deliberately small. We believe more people translate to more output if and only if each member is elite.
• You’ll be working with cracked founders. Jiehua was the youngest software engineer at Google Zurich and the first sales hire at Lio (YC S23). Almo shipped code at Microsoft and Amazon AWS, and was the first engineer at Leaping AI (YC W25).
• If you need any perks to feel productive, let us know and we’ll make it happen.

Process

1. 30 min call with a founder
2. Compensated take-home challenge
3. Offer