Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

This role is for an engineer who works directly with strategic customers to close the gap between how they work today and how they can work inside Plain. You will own the full lifecycle of customer-specific work, from initial discovery and scoping through implementation and handoff, ensuring that complex migrations and bespoke integrations are delivered cleanly and reliably. You will be the primary interface for customers during deployment, translating their existing setups into a durable, production-grade configuration inside the Plain platform. In parallel, you will observe which recurring customer needs should be abstracted into reusable product features, preventing one-off solutions from becoming permanent technical debt. You will collaborate daily with Sales, CX, Product, and core Engineering to surface insights, align on priorities, and feed learnings directly into the roadmap. Because you will be responsible for outcomes rather than just tasks, you will make tradeoffs between correctness, speed, and scale in real time to keep customers moving forward. This position is critical for maintaining the velocity of the core product team while raising the quality and consistency of how enterprise customers adopt Plain.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Work directly with customers to diagnose the problem, scope the fix, and ship it end to end.
• Own the system design for customer deployments, trading off correctness, scale, and speed as the situation demands.
• Explain the plan and the tradeoffs to whoever is in the room, engineer or not.
• Work with Sales, CX, Product, and core Engineering to get what you learn into the roadmap.
• Help define how the Forward Deployed function scales as the organization grows and matures.
• Translate messy, real-world customer environments into a clean, supported configuration inside the Plain platform.
• Break down vague customer requests into concrete technical scope and clearly documented decisions.
• Build integrations and workflows that connect Plain with existing tools in customer environments.
• Ensure that customer-specific changes remain maintainable, observable, and upgrade-friendly over time.
• Drive the technical discovery process, asking the right questions to uncover hidden complexity early.
• Represent Plain in customer calls, providing clear status updates and managing expectations throughout delivery.
• Partner with Product to identify which bespoke solutions should be generalized into reusable features.
• Instrument and monitor deployed changes to surface regressions before they impact end users.
• Document patterns and lessons learned so that future deployments benefit from your experience.

Requirements

• Have built and shipped full-stack products end to end.
• You are at home in modern frontend (React and TypeScript) and you write backend that holds up in production.
• Prototype quickly and learn from real usage. You would rather put something in front of a customer and change it than get the design right on paper first.
• Communicate exceptionally well. You can run a customer call, turn a vague ask into concrete scope, and write it up so nobody has to ask what was agreed.
• Have strong product sense. You can separate what a customer asked for from what they actually need.
• You know which one-off work should turn into product and which should stay one-off.
• You have the taste to decide whether it is worth building at all.
• Own the outcome without much scaffolding. This is an IC role in an early-stage, ambiguous environment, and you do not wait for clean requirements before unblocking someone.
• Stay calm when things get tense. Delays, bugs, and de-scoping conversations come with the job, and you can say yes to the reasonable asks while pushing back on the rest.

Practical notes

This role is hybrid with 3 days a week in our SF office. Because we work closely with our teammates in Europe, we start early, but you'll find quiet afternoons for heads-down work.