Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

FDE has become so popular nowadays that it seems every AI startup has a different definition of what it actually means.

This one doesn’t.

This is a genuinely rare opportunity to join a founding engineering team with the ambition, backing and strategy to build a future technology leader. The best part? They’re not building another AI wrapper. Rather than starting from scratch and spending years searching for PMF, they’re acquiring established businesses and building AI-native automation directly into their workflows, meaning what you build gets used by real customers from day one.

They’re tackling a huge real world problem. Across specialist industries, highly skilled professionals still spend hours dealing with spreadsheets, PDFs, emails, reports, compliance and repetitive admin instead of focusing on the work they’re actually paid to do. The company is rebuilding these workflows around AI, turning messy manual processes into software driven systems.

For an engineer like you, that creates a much better feedback loop, you'll understand the problem → build the solution → deploy it → see it being used. You’re not building something that might eventually find PMF; you’re solving problems that exist today.

The founders have previously built, scaled and sold businesses and have already raised $10m+ from top-tier investors, giving the company serious backing despite how early it is. As a Founding FDE, you’ll work directly with the founders, CTO and founding team, owning problems end-to-end across AI, automation, integrations, unstructured data and making AI work reliably in the real world.

You’ll be surrounded by exceptionally smart, passionate builders who want to build from 0→1, and the equity will reflect the level of ownership you’ll have. However, It won’t be for everyone, there will be ambiguity, difficult technical problems and long days but if you want genuine ownership and the chance to apply AI to real businesses rather than another SaaS dashboard, this is a very unusual opportunity.

You’ll ideally have:
 

• A polyglot engineering background with strong full-stack ability
• Experience building and shipping AI systems into production
• A genuine love for 0→1 product and engineering

If you're open to hearing more, apply below or email ethan.farrell@linuxrecruit.co.uk