Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

You’re a builder who works at the frontier with our customers. You deploy Nessie into customer environments, build the integrations and workflows they need, and bring what you learn back into the core product. We’re a tiny team with more real customer pull than we can carry, so you’re the technical force that makes deployments real, and you wear the hats a tiny company needs. You are not the sole owner of any customer; the founders lead those relationships, and you make us faster across the board.

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What "build" means here

• You have shipped something real: something with users, or something you use every day because you made it for yourself. You have gone from nothing to working software more than once.
• You’re comfortable across the stack. We ship native desktop apps on macOS, Windows, and Linux, a CLI and background daemon, agent integrations, and a cloud backend, across several languages. You do not need all of them; you need to be the kind of person who picks up what they need.
• You reach for AI tools instinctively (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) and you are faster because of it.

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What you will work on

Core engineering

• Ingestion at scale: a data lake for heterogeneous sources, from ChatGPT and Claude Code transcripts to meeting recorders, notes apps, email, and full agent traces. Raw data first, no lossy summarization upfront. Cross-provider capture is still the hardest unsolved problem in the space.
• Ontology: the live state of a company, not a static schema. Live sources, derived fields, conflict resolution, and authority, so humans and agents can trust the answer and it stays current as new work flows in.
• Self-improving agents: skills as the unit of improvement. Sync a team’s skills across Codex and Claude Code, measure every invocation, mine traces for failures and repeated workflows, and propose reviewable edits back.
• Search and retrieval that makes thousands of sessions and documents queryable in milliseconds, across local and cloud.
• Human-AI coordination: team sharing, permissions, and policy. Hierarchical sharing models, separating what is shared from what is visible, and letting an organization share its thinking without oversharing. This is what turns Nessie from an individual tool into the context layer for a whole organization.
• Agent-facing surfaces: CLI, MCP, and plugins for every major harness, so any AI tool can reach accumulated human reasoning.
• Enterprise readiness: self-hosted and on-prem deployments, SOC 2, and the control plane behind them, as we move into larger and more regulated organizations.

Forward deployment

• Embed with a customer to deploy Nessie into their environment: onboarding, the team-sharing and permissions rollout, integrations, and live troubleshooting, alongside the founders. You shadow first; the founders stay the relationship leads. Increasingly this includes self-hosted or on-prem setups for larger or regulated orgs.
• Own the customer feedback loop operationally: triage, reproduce, drive the fix with us, and make sure nothing slips.
• Build the integrations and glue a specific customer needs, in a way that re-packages into the product.
• Absorb operational work so we can all keep shipping. What you work on in week 1 may differ from week 4.

A bit of everything

• We keep this part intentionally broad. On a two-person team, beyond shipping product you'll help with internal ops, owning customer relationships, and the work that does not fit a job title. If you want to only write code and never touch anything else, this is not the role.

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What you will NOT need

• A specific degree or school
• Prior startup experience
• A perfect resume
• Permission to try things

What you will need

• The instinct to ship before it is perfect
• Extreme autonomy. We are two people. There is no manager. There is no spec. There is a problem and you figure out how to solve it.
• Opinions about products you use. If you have never looked at an app and thought "this is wrong and here is how I would fix it," we are probably not a match.
• Comfort with ambiguity. The product is evolving fast, and what you work on in week 1 may differ from week 4. That should excite you.

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Logistics

• San Francisco, in person.
• $100K-150K salary, 0.5%-1.0% equity.
• We’re open to sponsoring work authorization (including H-1B) for the right person.

How to apply

Show us something you built. A link to a project, a repo, a product, a tool. If you do not have something to show, build something this week and send it. We care about what you make, not what you say you can make.