Forward-Deployed Engineer

tl;dr

⊹ You are the engineer who owns Prox in the field: launch customer deployments, travel on-site, debug what breaks, measure whether users trust it, and turn rollout pain into product.

⊹ This is a travel-heavy engineering role. You should be excited to spend real time with customers at dealerships, service desks, factory offices, training rooms, and wherever the product is actually being used.

⊹ You will work directly with customers, founders, and founding engineers. You will write code, shape product, build deployment infrastructure, run evals, handle rollout analytics, and push fixes into the core platform.

⊹ A real rollout might start with one champion, expand to a pilot group, then move across 100+ dealerships across the US. Your job is to make that expansion measurable, stable, and successful.

⊹ Based in San Francisco when not traveling. We work in person.

What We’re Doing

Prox is building the AI product specialist for manufacturers.

Manufacturers use Prox as a technical support and product sales tool across the surfaces where their customers and teams already work: dealer tablets, service-desk computers, sales laptops, websites, internal tools, support workflows, and agent/MCP-style connectors.

A dealer, customer, support rep, or salesperson can ask Prox which product fits a use case, how to configure it, what parts are compatible, how to troubleshoot an issue, how to install or service it, or how to produce the right quote or setup guide.

The goal is simple: every manufacturer should be able to make their best product specialist available everywhere, instantly.

Why This Role Exists

Our bottleneck is not making impressive demos. Our bottleneck is making Prox reliable across messy, high-volume, real-world deployments.

Customers do not buy a model. They buy a rollout that works. That means the product has to be accurate, fast, stable, easy to use, measurable, and trusted by people who are not AI enthusiasts. They are sales reps, service managers, technicians, dealers, support teams, and customers trying to get work done.

The forward-deployed engineer is the bridge between that field reality and the core product.

You are not a solutions engineer who collects requirements and throws them over the wall. You are an engineer who gets close enough to the customer to understand exactly what is broken, then works with the team to fix it.

What You’ll Work On

Customer Deployments. Own deployments from kickoff to successful rollout. Learn the customer’s workflows, configure Prox for the account, test critical use cases, train users, monitor adoption, and make sure the deployment does not quietly die after launch.

Dealer and Field Rollouts. Help roll Prox out across distributed customer networks: dealerships, support teams, sales teams, field reps, and internal product experts. Figure out what each surface needs: tablet experience, desktop workflow, admin dashboard, website entry point, internal support flow, or connector.

Deployment Quality and Evals. Build the tests that tell us whether a deployment is actually ready. Can Prox answer the most common dealer questions? Can it handle compatibility and configuration? Does it cite correctly? Does it know when to escalate? Are the answers good enough for a technician or sales rep to trust?

Success Measurement. Define and track rollout metrics: adoption, repeat usage, answer quality, unresolved questions, escalation rates, dealer activation, quote/configuration completion, support deflection, latency, failed sessions, and customer-reported issues.

Product Feedback Loop. Turn customer pain into product work. When a rollout fails because of missing admin tooling, bad retrieval, weak citations, unstable integrations, poor analytics, or confusing UX, you write the spec, reproduce the issue, and work directly with founding engineers to ship the fix.

On-Site Work. Travel to customers, sit with users, watch them use the product, run trainings, debug workflows in person, and build trust with the people whose jobs Prox is changing. The best product insights will come from being in the room.

What We’re Looking For

⊹ strong engineer – you can build, debug, ship, and reason about systems without needing a perfect spec

⊹ customer-facing without being fake – you can talk to a VP, a dealer principal, a support rep, or a technician and make them feel like the product is in good hands

⊹ operationally intense – you can manage a rollout with many moving pieces and keep pressure on every loose end until it is resolved

⊹ good product taste – you can tell the difference between “technically works” and “a real user would actually trust this”

⊹ comfortable with travel – you should expect meaningful customer travel and enjoy being close to the field

⊹ high agency – if the rollout is blocked, you find the customer, the logs, the engineer, the missing workflow, the broken query, the failed session, and the next action

⊹ clear writer – you can turn messy customer feedback into crisp Linear issues, specs, rollout notes, postmortems, and product decisions

The Application Process

Step 1: Technical challenge. Build something that shows how you think about grounded AI systems, product reasoning, and messy customer-facing workflows.

Step 2: Founder call. We will talk through your work, your taste, your intensity, and what kind of responsibility you want.

Step 3: Deployment design interview. We will give you a real deployment scenario: a manufacturer rolling Prox out to a large dealer network. You will walk through kickoff, readiness, integrations, rollout, measurement, failure modes, and product fixes.

Step 4: Work trial. You come to SF and work with us for a few days. The expectation is to ship something real or move a real deployment forward.

Step 5: Offer.

A Word Directly To You

This role is for someone who wants the shortest possible path between building software and seeing whether it matters.

You will be in the codebase, in customer calls, in rollout dashboards, in dealerships, in bug reports, in product reviews, and in the room when we decide what to build next. You will get an unusual amount of responsibility because this company cannot win with handoff-heavy roles.

If you want to become the kind of engineer who can both build the product and make customers successful with it, this is the role.

–Dima & Greg