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.
Paragon is the AI growth engine for distributors and manufacturers, freeing up staff and growing revenue on autopilot.
Salary
$50,000 - $200,000
Equity
0.1% - 2%
Location
San Francisco, CA, US
Ishmael Samuel
