Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

You'll be the technical owner of customer deployments at Sylvan Labs, shepherding each engagement from initial data access through a working, trusted system that delivers measurable business outcomes. You'll sit at the intersection of data engineering, applied AI, and customer success—understanding business objectives, untangling messy warehouses, building agent-driven workflows, and proving the value we've created. This is a founding role where you'll both deliver for customers and build the tooling and frameworks that make the next deployment faster.

What You'll Do

• Understand customer business objectives by sitting with revenue and ops leaders to uncover the goals behind each request and decide what's worth building.
• Onboard new customers end to end, scoping data access and mapping undocumented warehouse schemas onto real business concepts.
• Stand up the ontology and validate the mapping by interviewing data and business teams, resolving their own inconsistent definitions before anything gets built on top.
• Build the signals and workflows customers see, including the agent harness behind them, and diagnose and improve outputs when they break.
• Own the value case from the start: agree on success measures upfront, then build the analysis and evidence that we delivered—or be honest and specific about why we didn't.
• Distill what you learn into reusable validation frameworks, eval harnesses, and mapping tools so the next deployment moves faster.

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years in a technical, customer-facing role (forward deployed, solutions engineering, or software engineering with heavy customer exposure); founder experience is a strong signal.
• Deep data warehouse fluency: SQL, dbt, and real comfort navigating undocumented schemas with no one left to ask.
• Ability to extract what a business concept actually means to a customer, resolve disagreements within their own team, and encode it cleanly.
• Applied data science literacy: understanding distributions, seasonality, validation design, and calibration well enough to know when a result is noise.
• Painstaking attention to detail—you'll chase a broken join for hours because a number looked off, and you care as much about readability as correctness.
• Comfort defining success metrics rather than just reporting on them, and the ability to build a credible case for impact.
• You hold a technical position under pushback and change your mind for evidence, not authority.
• High tolerance for ambiguity and unglamorous work; you work at the frontier of agent-driven development and keep finding ways to get more out of them than defaults allow.

Location

On-site in New York City.