Forward Deployed Engineer

Astral Insights is a B2B AI company building Artemis, an operational intelligence platform for manufacturing, quality, and supply chain teams. Artemis is headless in nature and integrates with experience layers like Microsoft Teams and our web app, deploying AI agents inside our clients' operations to detect signals, diagnose root causes, and drive actions that ultimately improve the bottom line. We serve enterprise clients across life sciences, specialized manufacturing, and healthcare organizations.

We operate as a lean, senior team and we hire people who want to own outcomes, not tickets.

The Role

The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is our tip of the spear inside client engagements. You sit between our clients' data, our Artemis platform, and the executives who signed the deal. You configure Artemis agents to the client's domain, wire up the data pipelines that feed them, stand up the full-stack surfaces clients interact with, and you stand in front of VPs and directors to show the work and the ROI.

This role is built for someone who embraces modern AI-supported development, tried and true SWE fundamentals, and client-facing implementation. You do not need to be the world's best data engineer, full-stack developer, prompt engineer, or implementation consultant. You need to be capable across all of these domains and passionate about working closely with clients to solve meaningful problems. If the idea of being thrown a problem you have never solved before and shipping it in a week sounds exciting instead of terrifying, this might be a fit.

What You'll Do

Own the end-to-end configuration of agents on the Artemis platform for each client deployment. Prompt engineering, context engineering, tool wiring, evaluation loops, and tuning until the agent behaves the way the client's operators expect.

Design and ship the bronze, silver, and gold layers that feed Artemis. Ingest messy enterprise data (ERP extracts, SQL Server, flat files, APIs), clean it, model it, and land it in the structures our agents consume. You are responsible for data quality, not just data movement.

Run working sessions with client data, IT, and operations teams. Translate their requirements into sprint work. Handle the ambiguity directly rather than punting it back to the founders.

Walk VPs and directors through what the agents found, what actions were taken, and what it was worth. Build and deliver ROI narratives. Our champions have to be able to defend the investment to their leadership, and your deliverables are what they use.

Be on the ground for kickoffs, major checkpoints, executive readouts, and go-lives. Expect roughly a dozen travel days per year across the united states.

Own the outcome, not a subtask. If a signal is firing wrong, if a dashboard is stale, if an agent is hallucinating, if the data pipeline broke, it is your problem to diagnose and fix, regardless of which layer it lives in.

Use Claude Code, Codex, and similar tools as force multipliers. Know when to trust the output, when to verify it, and when to throw it out. We expect you to ship more than a traditional engineer, not the same amount with more help.

Who You Are

Across some combination of data engineering, full-stack development, and AI or ML work. You do not need depth in all three, but you need to have shipped production systems in at least one and be hungry to learn the others fast.

Comfortable with SQL, Python, data modeling, and the bronze / silver / gold medallion pattern (or equivalent lakehouse / warehouse patterns). Hands-on experience with AWS is required (our primary stack), and experience with Microsoft Azure is a plus since we integrate with it as well.

You have led calls with client teams. You have presented to executives. You can translate a technical result into a business outcome and a dollar amount without being prompted. You are comfortable being the face of the company on a customer call.

You use Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar tools every day and have opinions about them. You see AI tools as the way to punch above your weight, not a crutch. You are excited about walking into problems you cannot yet solve and solving them anyway.

Early-stage startup energy. Things break. Scope changes. Clients ask for things that were not in the SOW. You handle it and keep the trains moving.

Nice to Have

• Experience in manufacturing, quality, or supply chain domains (root cause analysis, CAPA, quality investigations, S&OP, logistics).
• Experience with Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, or the broader Microsoft data stack (we integrate with Azure).
• Experience with Teams…