Forward Deployed Engineer

Department: Product & Engineering
Reports to: CEO
Location: Scottsdale, Arizona
About Wise Pelican

You'll take ideas, especially around AI and our real estate marketing product, and turn them into things that make a tangible impact on our clients' real world work. That means shipping code, talking to customers, untangling messy workflows, and owning the last 10% that makes or breaks our product.

We're a bootstrapped company, so everything we build matters. Revenue, client retention, internal ease-of-use; you help move the needle on all of it.

This is a full-time, onsite position located in Scottsdale, Arizona.

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• Partner with the CEO and cross-functional leaders to identify product and AI opportunities tied to revenue , customer success, efficiency, or long-term company value.

• Work directly with customers and internal teams to understand their workflows, uncover the actual problem, and translate ambiguous business needs into a clear technical plan.

• Build full-stack solutions using Python, Type Script, and React , including product features, internal tools, integrations, data workflows, and AI-supported applications.

• Own project s from discovery and prototyping through testing, production deployment, adoption, and ongoing improvement.

• Define what success should look like before development begins and measure whether the finished solution creates the intended business or customer outcome
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• Make practical decisions about scope , speed, maintainability, security, and technical quality so projects move forward without creating avoidable messes behind them.

• Turn successful customer-specific or internal solutions into reusable components, documented playbooks, and scalable product capabilities
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• Bring lessons from customers and real-world deployments back to the broader product roadmap.

• Keep stakeholders informed , surface risks early, and create enough structure to prevent important work from getting lost between departments.

• Learn Wise Pelican's product, technical architecture, business model, customer workflows, and current AI initiatives.
• Partner with the CEO to define the initial purpose, priorities, success measures, and working model for our Forward Deployed Engineering function.
• Review our current pipeline of product and AI ideas to identify the projects with the clearest path to revenue, user success, or meaningful operational leverage.
• Take an existing prototype, stalled initiative, or high-priority business problem through the final stretch and into reliable production use.
• Establish lightweight standards for project discovery, technical scoping, deployment, documentation, feedback, and outcome measurement.

• Own a portfolio of internal and customer-facing initiatives from business problem through measurable result.
• Build reusable tools, integrations, and implementation patterns so each successful project makes the next one faster and more valuable.
• Help determine when a customer need should remain a tailored solution and when it should become part of Wise Pelican's core product.
• Help shape and eventually scale the Forward Deployed Engineering function, including its goals, processes, responsibilities, and future hiring needs.

• You have a strong software engineering foundation and evidence that you have shipped real, working software, beyond coursework, tutorials, or prototypes that have never met a paying user.

• You are comfortable building production applications with Python, Type Script, and React.

• You understand full-stack development fundamentals, including APIs, databases, testing, debugging, deployment, authentication, and cloud-based systems.

• You can independently work through technical problems and know when to ask for context, support, or a second opinion.

• You can speak with customers, executives, developers, and nontechnical stakeholders without requiring everyone else to learn your language first.

• You communicate progress, tradeoffs, risks, and changing expectations before they become surprises.

• You enjoy understanding how a business works and can connect technical decisions to revenue, adoption, efficiency, risk, and customer outcomes.

• You are comfortable beginning with an unclear problem, asking direct questions, organizing the moving pieces, and creating a reasonable path forward.

• You use numerous AI development tools thoughtfully.

• You want to build and deliver, not recommend what someone else should build.

• You have built or deployed production systems involving LLMs, AI agents, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluations, guardrails, or human-in-the-loop workflows.

• You have worked directly with customers through implementation, solutions engineering, technical consulting, product development, or a similar role.

• You have experience inside an early-stage or bootstrapped company where you had to operate without layers of process, specialized teams, or unlimited resources.

• You have worked with marketing…