Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

You will operate at the intersection of product, sales, and engineering as the primary technical advocate for Reducto's enterprise customers. You will own the end-to-end deployment journey, from initial discovery and scoping through configuration, tuning, and ongoing optimization in production environments. This role requires you to build and iterate on bespoke solutions that translate complex customer requirements into reliable document processing workflows. You will directly validate system performance by designing eval harnesses and diagnostics that prove value and drive expansion. You will act as the voice of the customer within engineering, shaping the product roadmap based on real-world constraints and opportunities. This position demands extreme ownership, where you ship fast, fix issues before they escalate, and build durable relationships with key technical stakeholders. Your daily work will involve constructing prototype applications and demos that de-risk adoption and showcase the full power of the platform.

Key facts

What you'll do

Build end-to-end document processing pipelines that solve for specific enterprise customer requirements, including custom extraction logic and tailored output formats.

Deploy and configure Reducto systems in diverse production environments, ensuring reliability, security, and performance under real-world data loads.

Create interactive eval applications and dashboards that provide clear visibility into extraction accuracy, latency, and regressions across customer environments.

Collaborate with Sales and Customer Success teams to scope technical feasibility, run discovery sessions, and align solutions with business objectives.

Translate ambiguous customer problems into well-defined technical experiments, using a quantitative approach to validate hypotheses and measure impact.

Customize the Reducto platform through extensions, agents, and integrations that address unique enterprise workflows and compliance needs.

Develop and maintain demo and prototype applications that showcase core capabilities and accelerate the customer decision-making process.

Establish strong communication channels with product and engineering teams, surfacing insights from customer interactions to prioritize feature development and improvements.

Own the diagnostic tooling and monitoring frameworks that ensure stability and traceability across customer deployments and edge cases.

Act as a hands-on technical partner who drives adoption by resolving complex issues and enabling customers to realize measurable value from their contracts.

Work closely with founders to define strategic priorities for early customers and iterate on product positioning based on deployment feedback.

Build robust datasets and evaluation harnesses that continuously test the performance of document parsing across evolving document types and layouts.

Champion best practices for debugging and experimentation, enabling the team to iterate rapidly while maintaining high standards of quality.

Serve as the central point for technical escalation, guiding customers and internal stakeholders toward successful implementations.

Requirements

You are your own worst critic. You have a high bar for quality and don't rest until the job is done right - no settling for 90%. We want someone who ships fast, with high agency, and who doesn't just voice problems but actively jumps in to fix them.

You have 3 to 6 years of experience deploying software in production settings - ideally with enterprise or regulated customers.

You're excellent with Python and can navigate Bash and infrastructure as needed.

You can build your own tools as needed - like a quick Streamlit app to test hypotheses or create a dataset.

You approach problems with a quantitative mindset, using data to debug, experiment, and iterate quickly.

You are comfortable managing the full development lifecycle from ideation to shipping to users.

You have a strong understanding of how to evaluate complex document structures and extract information reliably.

You are comfortable working with LLMs, vision models, and heuristic systems in a production context.

Nice to have

Have prior experience founding a company or building products at early stages.

Have prior experience in a forward-deployed type role, enabling large customer(s) to succeed through your efforts.

Keep up with the latest developments in ML/AI.

Practical notes

This is an in person role at our office in SF. We're an early stage company which means that the role requires working hard and moving quickly. Please only apply if that excites you.