Forward Deployed Engineer
NegotiateAI5 hours ago
New York, NY, USAMid Level
Responsibilities
- Embed with customer procurement and IT teams to map spend flows, data, workflows, and savings opportunities.
- Define, instrument, and track customer success metrics such as realized savings, categorization accuracy, cycle time, and coverage.
- Build integrations with SAP, Ariba, Coupa, Oracle, NetSuite, data warehouses, SSO and identity systems, and SFTP workflows.
- Create pipelines for supplier entity resolution, part identifier normalization, category mapping, and defensible ground truth.
- Model customer spend in ClickHouse and optimize analytics queries as datasets scale.
- Customize and harden agentic workflows involving retrieval sources, tools, prompts, guardrails, reliability, and observability.
- Build customer-specific evaluations to measure accuracy, identify regressions, and demonstrate progress.
- Drive adoption through customer training, runbooks, and durable handoffs to internal champions.
- Lead prospect demos, scope pilots, and handle security reviews, data-handling questions, and SOC 2 questionnaires.
- Generalize recurring integrations, failure modes, and workflows into the core product rather than one-off scripts.
Requirements
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience and a track record of shipping production systems end to end.
- Demonstrated comfort working directly with customers, stakeholders, and senior procurement or IT leaders.
- Hands-on production experience with LLMs, including agentic workflows, tool use, retrieval, structured outputs, and evaluation.
- Strong backend and integration skills, including API design, data pipelines, and working with imperfect system documentation.
- Experience cleaning and normalizing messy real-world data, resolving entities, and establishing ground truth.
- Judgment about when to build bespoke customer solutions and when to generalize them into product capabilities.
- Comfort working with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and early-stage startup conditions.
- Willingness to travel to customer sites roughly once or twice per month depending on the deployment.
- Experience with enterprise procurement or ERP integrations such as SAP, Ariba, Coupa, Oracle, or NetSuite is preferred.
- Procurement, supply chain, sourcing, or manufacturing software experience is preferred.
- Deep production experience with TypeScript is preferred.
- Experience designing production agent harnesses is preferred.
- Experience with ClickHouse or columnar analytics stores such as BigQuery, Snowflake, or Databricks is preferred.
- Experience with SOC 2, GDPR, or similar startup compliance requirements is preferred.
- Prior forward deployed, deployment strategist, solutions engineering, or technical consulting experience is preferred.
- Early-stage startup experience from seed through Series B is preferred.
Benefits
- The role includes travel to customer sites, primarily manufacturing and industrial companies, roughly once or twice per month depending on the deployment.
- The position offers an opportunity to be the first Forward Deployed Engineer and work closely with earliest customers in an early-stage startup.
Tech Stack
Categories
Forward Deployed
About NegotiateAI
NegotiateAI builds an enterprise AI platform for manufacturing and industrial companies to analyze spend, benchmark suppliers, and automate procurement negotiations, especially for indirect categories. The company sells its software to procurement teams as a SaaS platform with data workflow and analytics features. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in San Francisco, it is privately held.