Founding Engineer

San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Visa Sponsorship

About the role

Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will work directly with customers and the founding team to turn real industrial workflows into working end-to-end agents.

One day you may be mapping how an inside sales team handles RFQs. The next day you may be building a messy integration, improving product matching, writing evals for an agent, or talking to a 65 year old industry veteran to capture their knowledge.

What You’ll Do

- Build AI agents for quote intake, order entry, product matching, pricing, inventory checks, and customer/vendor communication.

- Integrate with messy real-world systems: Mainframe ERPs, CRMs, email inboxes, semi-broken APIs, scattered spreadsheets, etc.

- Work directly with users to understand how work actually happens, not how a process doc says it happens.

- Ship full-stack features across backend services, internal tools, customer-facing UI, and data pipelines.

- Build learning loops so agents get more reliable over time.

- Debug production issues in customer environments and turn one-off fixes into reusable product improvements.

You Might Be a Fit If

- You are technical, completing a CS degree or similar, and love Claude Code/Codex etc with multiple agents running in parallel.

- You like the idea of sitting next to a user and building product on the spot.

- You have built projects using LLMs outside class: startups, hackathons, open-source, research, automation scripts, internal tools. Bonus if it has had some users. Extra bonus if those users yelled at you about something!

- You can explain technical ideas to non-technical people and genuinely have fun doing it.

- You are curious about industries other than tech.

Nice To Have

- Experience with industrials or distribution, ERP systems, Outlook integrations

- Prior customer-facing technical work: FDE, solutions engineering, implementation, consulting, founder, or freelance projects.

Why Join

- Real ownership: your work will be used by customers and you will hear immediately if something does not work (and be expected to fix it).

- Travel: you will be flying to customer sites, sitting with teams, and seeing your agents do work in real environments.

- Exposure to the full startup loop: customer discovery, product decisions, engineering tradeoffs, deployment, support, and iteration.

- A chance to build AI for an overlooked but massive part of the economy.

About Paragon

The AI Growth Engine for Industrials

Other roles at Paragon

Interested?

Let me introduce you to the founders.

Skip the process

Job details

Salary

$50,000 - $200,000

Equity

0.1% - 2%

Location

San Francisco, CA

Experience

0+ years

Company

NameParagon
IndustryOperations
Team Size2

Funding

Total raised

$22M

Last stage

Seed

Investors

Y Combinator

Founders

Brandon Foo

Brandon Foo

LinkedIn
Ishmael Samuel

Ishmael Samuel

LinkedIn
Ishir Vaidyanath

Ishir Vaidyanath

LinkedIn
Kasyap Chakra

Kasyap Chakra

LinkedIn

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.