Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) - Founding Team

About NegotiateAI (Menlo Ventures Backed)

We’re building a revolutionary enterprise platform to enable procurement Superintelligence. Our mission is to transform procurement into a core strategic function, starting with the manufacturing and industrial verticals. Our focus is to streamline indirect spend, delivering exceptional cost savings and operational efficiency to procurement teams everywhere. It’s time to bring innovation and efficiency to procurement.

Backed by Menlo Ventures and led by a former Apple leader, we are building the intelligence layer that brings AI to enterprise Procurement, Spend, and Supply Chain. We unify fragmented ERP and supplier data into a single, actionable model and apply advanced Agentic AI and RAG to automate sourcing, negotiations, benchmarking, and real-time compliance — unlocking millions in savings for global enterprises.

This is a rare opportunity to join a seed stage AI startup that is building foundational infrastructure and applied AI that delivers quantifiable ROI for the world’s largest enterprise procurement teams. If you’re excited about solving complex technical challenges and building a transformative product from the ground up, we’d love for you to join us.

About this role

This foundational teammate will be responsible for the successful deployment of our AI-driven procurement platform. You will own the full deployment lifecycle and successful onboarding, customizing and integrating our AI driven procurement platform into the customer's unique technical landscape. This role is also a critical feedback engine, translating customer-side deployment challenges directly into product improvements that define the future of how enterprises manage their spend

Core Responsibilities

As our first Forward Deployed Engineer you will be the critical link between our product and our customers, ensuring successful deployment and maximizing customer value. Your mission is two-fold: successfully deploy our product and drive its evolution.

1. Customer Deployment & Ownership

• End-to-End Ownership: Own the entire customer lifecycle from data ingestion and deployment through production go-live and ongoing success.

• Onboarding & Integration: Design, build, and deploy custom integration layers and tooling necessary to connect our platform with complex customer data sources and systems.

• Travel & Presence: Be willing and able to travel to customer sites to conduct technical workshops, troubleshoot integration issues, and validate solution performance directly.

2. Solution Research & Planning

• Deep Customer Empathy: Research customer workflows and technical environments to identify integration challenges, technical blockers, and opportunities for deploying our Agentic AI features.

• Solution Architecture: Rapidly scope, design, and prototype novel solutions and workarounds using internal and external tools to accelerate customer time-to-value.

• Metrics & Validation: Define and track key deployment and performance metrics to measure and communicate the ROI of our platform to technical and business stakeholders.

3. Product Development & Feedback Loop

• Full Stack Contribution: Apply strong full-stack software engineering skills to build internal tooling, automation scripts, and reusable deployment components that standardize future customer onboarding.

• Product Partnership: Work closely with the core Product and Engineering teams, translating real-world customer deployment issues, missing features, and technical feedback into clear requirements to influence the roadmap.

• Technical Excellence: Ensure all custom code and deployment scripts are written to production standards, are well-documented, and adhere to security best practices.

What You’ll Bring: Required Skills

• Software Engineering Fluency: 3+ years of experience as a Software Engineer with demonstrated proficiency across the full stack (e.g., Python/TypeScript, SQL databases).

• Client-Facing Resilience: Ability to manage and resolve high-stakes technical challenges in a live customer environment, demonstrating exceptional communication, clarity, and urgency.

• Data Integration Expertise: Experience working with high-volume datasets, including building ETL/ELT pipelines and interacting with diverse APIs (REST, SOAP, etc.).

• ERP experience: Optional, nice to have experience working with enterprise ERPs such as Coupa, SAP, Oracle Fusion and Microsoft BC/F&O.

• Entrepreneurial Drive: You thrive in the ambiguity of a seed-stage startup, are a proactive self-starter, and have a "get-it-done" attitude.

The Growth Opportunity

This role is a clear path to leadership. For the right candidate, this position will naturally grow into building and leading the Forward Deployed Engineering organization in the company. You will define the team's processes, establish best practices for deployment excellence, and eventually hire, mentor, and manage a team of high-performing FDEs as the company scales.