Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

You’re a builder who works at the frontier with our customers. You deploy Nessie into customer environments, build the integrations and workflows they need, and bring what you learn back into the core product. We’re two people with more real customer pull than two people can carry, so you’re the technical and product force that makes deployments real, and you wear the hats a tiny company needs. You make our customer operations and relationships faster across the board.

What "build" means here

You have shipped something real: something with users, or something you use every day because you made it for yourself. You have gone from nothing to working software more than once.
You’re comfortable across the stack. Our codebase is Swift/SwiftUI (macOS app), Go (backend), and TypeScript (services). You do not need experience in all of these. You need to be the kind of person who picks up what they need.
You reach for AI tools instinctively (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) and you are faster because of it. If your first instinct under pressure is to stare at the code instead of handing it to an agent, this is not the right fit.

What you will work on

Core engineering

Cross-platform conversation sync across many AI providers, the hardest unsolved capture problem in the space
Search and retrieval that makes thousands of conversations queryable in milliseconds
Ontology and knowledge structuring: turning messy conversational material into trustworthy, typed knowledge
AI governance: team sharing, permissions, and policy. This is what turns Nessie from an individual tool into the context layer for a whole organization.
Agent-facing APIs (CLI, MCP) that let any AI tool reach accumulated human reasoning
Self-hosted and on-prem deployments, plus the security and compliance that come with them, as we move into larger and more regulated organizations
The intelligence layer that sits underneath every AI interaction
Agent-trace intelligence: extracting the first-class signal that lives only inside AI sessions and agent traces into a queryable layer for observability, eval, and self-improving agent workflows

Forward deployment

Embed with a customer to deploy Nessie into their environment: onboarding, the team-sharing and permissions rollout, integrations, and live troubleshooting, alongside the founders. You shadow first; the founders stay the relationship leads. Increasingly this includes self-hosted or on-prem setups for larger or regulated orgs.
Own the customer feedback loop operationally: triage, reproduce, drive the fix with us, and make sure nothing slips.
Build the integrations and glue a specific customer needs, in a way that re-packages into the product.
Absorb operational work so we can all keep shipping. What you work on in week 1 may differ from week 4.

A bit of everything

We keep this part intentionally broad. On a two-person team, beyond shipping product you'll help with internal ops, owning customer relationships, and the work that does not fit a job title. If you want to only write code and never touch anything else, this is not the role.

What you will NOT need

A specific degree or school
Prior startup experience
A perfect resume
Permission to try things

What you will need

The instinct to ship before it is perfect
Extreme autonomy. We are two people. There is no manager. There is no spec. There is a problem and you figure out how to solve it.
Opinions about products you use. If you have never looked at an app and thought "this is wrong and here is how I would fix it," we are probably not a match.
Comfort with ambiguity. The product is evolving fast, and what you work on in week 1 may differ from week 4. That should excite you.

Logistics

San Francisco, in person.
$100K-150K salary, 0.5%-1.0% equity.
We’re open to sponsoring work authorization (including H-1B) for the right person.

How to apply

Show us something you built. A link to a project, a repo, a product, a tool. If you do not have something to show, build something this week and send it. We care about what you make, not what you say you can make.

Founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Nessie