Forward Deployed Software Engineer

About us

Encord is the universal data layer for AI that helps 300+ AI teams train and run models on the right data. Our platform indexes, curates, annotates, and evaluates data across the full AI lifecycle, from development through production. Trusted by Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath, Zipline, and more.

We're an ambitious team of 100+ working at the frontier of AI and have raised $60M in Series C funding from Wellington Management, CRV, Next47 and Y Combinator.

The role

We're looking for an exceptional Forward Deployed Software Engineer (FDSE) to join our product engineering team. This is an engineering-first role: FDSEs are the technical owners who take the Encord platform into our most strategic and advanced customer environments, working directly with clients' engineering teams to identify problems and design, build, and ship the solutions that solve them.

As an early member of the Forward Deployed team, you'll have an outsized impact on shaping a critical function for Encord and our customers, in a role that combines hands-on engineering with direct client ownership. You’ll do tough system design calls under real customer load, and customers will trust you to get their hardest integration and workflow problems actually solved. You’ll operate autonomously, defining your own path to a solution, managing client relationships directly, and feeding what you learn straight back into the product roadmap.

As an end-to-end owner of the deployment process, you will work across a variety of problems: technical engineering, operational excellence, and strategic product work. Expect to build data integrations, guide customers with best practices, demo the product, and contribute to the product roadmap.

What you'll do

• Design and ship high-quality, production-grade code that integrates Encord into customers' most complex data and ML pipelines

• Own system design decisions for customer deployments, balancing correctness, scalability, and speed

• Work directly with clients' engineering teams to diagnose problems, scope solutions, and ship fixes end-to-end

• Build data integrations and technical solutions that support customer onboarding, adoption, and scale at pace

• Communicate technical plans and tradeoffs clearly to both engineering counterparts and non-technical stakeholders

• Operate with a high degree of autonomy: identify the right problem to solve, decide how to solve it, and see it through with minimal oversight

• Collaborate with product and engineering to feed customer insights back into the roadmap

• Help define and scale the Forward Deployed function as an early team member

Who we're looking for

• A strong software engineer with excellent system design instincts and a track record of shipping high-quality code, frequently and reliably

• An excellent problem-solver who can take an ambiguous customer situation, break it down, and design a technical solution from scratch

• A great communicator who is motivated by building customer relationships and solving customer problems

• Entrepreneurial and autonomous mind, energized by ambiguity and competing technical priorities, and able to manage client relationships and technical delivery without close supervision

• Ambitious and hardworking, with a track record of top-percentile performance in whatever environment you've been in, whether engineering, academia, business, or sport

Experience requirements

• 3–8 years in a software engineering role; Python is a big plus

• Experience building or working with data integrations and APIs

• Strong written and verbal communication skills

• Ability to thrive in ambiguity and take ownership without being told what to do

• Prior experience at a high-growth startup is a plus

Why Encord

• Competitive salary, commission, and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup

• Clear, accelerated growth opportunities as the company scales rapidly

• Strong in-person culture: 4–5 days/week in our newly launched office

• Flexible PTO to fully recharge

• 18 paid vacation days in the U.S. plus federal holidays

• Annual learning & development budget

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage

• Frequent travel opportunities across the U.S., London, and Europe

• Bi-annual company offsites, twice-weekly team lunches, and monthly socials