Forward Deployed Engineer; FDE

Hybrid - St. Charles, IL & Fulton Market, Chicago

You're the technical person in the room with the client — and the one who builds the thing after the call ends. You'll join discovery calls, understand a client's actual problem (not just what they asked for), sketch 2–3 viable approaches, scope and price the work, then deliver it. You own solutions end-to-end: from "here's what's possible" to "here's the thing, working, in production."

This is not a presales role where you hand off to a delivery team. This is not a heads-down dev role where requirements arrive fully formed. It's both halves in one seat.

• Sit in on client calls and translate business problems into technical options with real tradeoffs (speed vs. cost vs. complexity)
• Scope, roadmap, and price solutions — you'll draft the SOW, not just estimate hours for someone else's
• Build what you scoped: full-stack applications, automations, integrations, internal tools, AI workflows
• Deploy and maintain what you ship — you own it through production, not just through demo
• Feed what you learn in the field back into our productized offerings

• Full-stack
  : comfortable across frontend (React/Next.js), backend (Node/APIs), and databases (Postgres/Supabase — schema design, not just queries)
• AI-native development
  : you use tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor as force multipliers — and you know their limits. You can direct agents to do real work, review what they produce critically, and ship code you understand and stand behind
• Modern deployment
  :
  Vercel, serverless, CI/CD — you ship fast without shipping fragile
• Integration fluency
  : REST APIs, webhooks, OAuth, and gluing together the tools our clients actually run (Hub Spot, Quick Books, Webflow, Zapier/Make)
• AI implementation
  : building LLM-powered workflows and agents for clients — prompt design, RAG, MCP, evals — not just using AI to code

• Client-facing confidence: you can explain a technical decision to a non-technical owner and hold the room
• Judgment on scope — knowing when the simple version is the right version
• Comfort with ambiguity; you'll often be defining the problem, not just solving it
• A builder's pace with an engineer's standards — AI tooling makes you faster, not sloppier
• Bonus: agency or consulting background

Clients trust your recommendations, projects come in close to what you scoped, and the things you build keep working after you move on.