
Forward Deployed Engineer
San Francisco, CA at a glance
- Rent
- #2 of 51$2,680/mo+46% vs US avg
- Weather
- #17 of 51295 mild days0 hot · 0 cold
- Income tax
- #1 of 5113.3% top rateCalifornia
What you need
- 3-7 yrs professional software engineering experience
- Strong backend/API design; Python, JavaScript/TypeScript proficiency
- Production systems experience: observability, scaling, on-call
- Customer-facing technical discovery and scoping skills
- Judgment to generalize vs bespoke solutions
What you'll do
- Ship production code in core platform (backend, APIs, data pipelines)
- Design robust APIs for product and field integrations
- Build and productionize LLM agent workflows with evals, guardrails
- Operate systems: instrumentation, observability, SRE in customer environments
- Embed with customers to learn workflows, own technical delivery end-to-end
About Sixtyfour
Sixtyfour helps teams understand the people, companies, and entities they interact with, with a primary focus on Compliance (AML/KYB), Trust & Safety, Cybersecurity, and Investigations. Our platform combines agents, LLMs, and large-scale data infrastructure to surface information essential for critical decision-making.
The Role
Forward Deployed Engineers sit between our customers and our codebase. Some days you'll be in a working session with a compliance team learning how they actually run an alert to disposition; other days you'll be in our repos shipping the pipeline that makes that workflow ten times faster.
Roughly half of this job is building the core product alongside the rest of engineering. The other half is deploying, extending, and tuning it inside real customer environments. This is not a support or solutions role, you'll be held to the same engineering bar as everyone else on the team. The difference is that you will be the engineer that customers go to first, and the one who sees their problems firsthand.
What You'll Do
Build
- Ship production code in the core platform alongside the rest of engineering including backend services, APIs, data pipelines, search
- Design robust, well-architected APIs that power both our product and the integrations you deploy in the field
- Build and productionize agent workflows and LLM-powered systems, including evals, guardrails, and cost/latency tuning
- Operate what you build: instrumentation, observability, and SRE work when a pipeline breaks in a customer's environment at an inconvenient hour
Deploy
- Embed with customers to learn their workflows, data, and constraints directly rather than through a requirements doc
- Own technical delivery end to end: scoping, data onboarding, integration, deployment into their infrastructure, and the first weeks of production use
- Bridge the current platform to customers with custom connectors, enrichment steps, migration scripts, internal tooling, etc
- Be the credible technical voice in the room, whether you're talking to an analyst who has never seen an API or to their staff engineer who is skeptical of yours
Close the loop
- Distinguish one-offs from the emerging pattern, and push patterns back into the core platform
- Bring the field back to engineering, product, and leadership as evidence for what to prioritize
- Set honest expectations with customers about what's shipping and when, and hold the line when the answer is "not soon"
- Leave behind runbooks, docs, and internal write-ups so the next deployment is faster than the last
What We're Looking For
- 3–7 years of professional software engineering experience
- Strong fundamentals: you can drop into an unfamiliar codebase, debug a production incident, design a clean API, and reason clearly about data models and failure modes
- Strong backend development and API design experience; proficiency in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript
- Experience running systems in production with observability, scaling, and on-call ownership
- Real comfort in front of customers: you can run a technical discovery conversation, push back on a stakeholder without damaging the relationship, and turn a vague business problem into a scoped technical one
- Judgment about what to generalize and what to leave bespoke, and the discipline to advocate for the former
- Comfortable in a fast-paced, early-stage environment with high ownership and ambiguity
- Willing to be based in or relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area, with occasional travel to customer sites
Our Stack
We'd like to see depth in several of these and a track record of picking up the rest quickly:
Kubernetes · Temporal · Apache Spark · AWS (Glue, EC2, CloudWatch, Data Prepper) · OpenRouter · Next.js and Vercel · Stripe
Nice to Have
- Experience developing agents or building evals for LLM systems
- Prior forward-deployed, solutions architecture, or technical account engineering experience at a product company
- Domain exposure to compliance/AML/KYB, Trust & Safety, fraud, cybersecurity, or investigations
- Experience deploying software into regulated or security-sensitive environments (SOC 2, data residency, VPC or on-prem installs)
- Experience building developer-facing products or platforms (APIs, SDKs, dev tools)
- Prior startup experience, ideally at a similar stage
- Experience working in an AI company
Benefits
- Unlimited PTO
- Lunch on us in the office
- Monthly gym membership reimbursement
- Monthly AI tools/productivity reimbursement
- 401k with company match
- Health / Dental / Vision
- Flexible working hours
Optimize your resume for this job
Get a match score and the keywords you're missing
About Sixtyfour
Sixtyfour is a AI based reasech service company that automates to enrich specialized professionals, company data, and insights.
Similar Software roles


