Forward Deployed Engineer

Company Overview

Commerce

IQ's AI-powered digital commerce platform is revolutionizing the way brands sell online. Our unified e‑commerce management solutions empower brands to make smarter, faster decisions through insights that optimize the digital shelf, increase retail media ROI and fuel incremental sales across the world's largest marketplaces.

With a global network of more than 900 retailers, our end‑to‑end platform helps over 2,200 of the world's leading brands streamline marketing, supply chain, and sales operations to profitably grow market share in more than 50 countries. Ten of the top 12 CPG brands work with us, including Coca‑Cola, Nestlé, Colgate‑Palmolive, and Mondelez.

We've raised over $200M from some of the top investors including Soft Bank, Insight Partners, and Madrona. Learn more .

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will partner closely with our founders and the AI Product Managers to prototype and deploy AI‑driven solutions that solve our customers' most pressing problems. This is a founding engineering role with high visibility; you will report directly to our Head of AI Strategy and Outcomes. You will also partner with other members of the executive leadership team who are based at our Mountain View HQ, collaborate with our Bangalore‑based engineering team, and engage daily with enterprise customers.

You will help define how we work with our most important customers, shape the company's first ever forward‑deployed engineering function, and contribute to our mission of helping brands win in AI‑driven e‑commerce.

This position is on‑site in Hoboken, New Jersey with approximately 50% travel expected to client locations. We are only considering candidates located in the tri‑state area at this time.

• Build prototypes with customers: Work alongside our AI Product Manager to understand real‑world problems, rapidly scope use cases and create working prototypes. You'll engage in hands‑on discovery and convert insights into functional demos for prospective and existing customers.
• Integrate data and create new AI agents: Ingest data from disparate sources (ERPs, e‑commerce platforms, custom APIs) and build agents that solve the specific use cases uncovered during discovery. This includes turning edge‑case business rules into runtime‑editable settings rather than hard‑coded logic.
• Own AI outcomes: Lead customer‑facing demonstrations and proof‑of‑concepts. You'll instrument and tune models using production feedback loops to ensure prototypes deliver measurable outcomes.
• Rapidly iterate & generalize: Collaborate with engineering teams in Bangalore to transform prototypes into robust features. Your work will be implemented into our core product – patterns that succeed in one deployment (custom adapters, monitoring dashboards) should be packaged as reusable modules.
• Own the full lifecycle: Support engagements from pre‑sales scoping through post‑deployment refinement. You'll help negotiate scope, push back on unreasonable asks, and ensure long‑term customer success. Additionally, you'll act as the technical liaison between customers, product managers, and engineering.
• Cultivate customer relationships: Develop deep empathy for our customers' business drivers and serve as their advocate. Use clear, engaging communication to convey technical concepts to non‑technical stakeholders, build trust and handle high‑stakes conversations.

• Experienced engineer (4–6 years or more) with a strong foundation in software development (data structures, system design, debugging). Comfortable coding in Python or Java and learning new technologies quickly.
• Full‑stack & data integration skills. Experience connecting to APIs, working with SQL/No
  
  SQL databases, streaming/ETL pipelines and deploying AI/LLM‑based agents.
• Customer‑facing problem solver. You enjoy working directly with external users, conducting discovery, and translating ambiguous requirements into working solutions. You have excellent communication skills and the ability to simplify complex technical topics.
• Rapid prototyper. You are biased towards action and are comfortable delivering minimal‑viable…