Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

The role

Every company is trying to deploy AI, and most consumer brands stall on the hard part: messy data and business problems nobody has cracked. As an FDE, you walk into a brand as the lead for its AI deployment and solve a problem it has never been able to solve.

You own a set of brands from kickoff until their team runs real work in Drivepoint without us. Depending on the customer, you may stay on as their partner through the year: new problems, new workflows, renewal and expansion. You report to our Head of Product and work hybrid in New York City.

What you'll do

Solve the hard data problems. Shopify orders that don't tie to the books, a channel counted twice, retailer data that arrives as five different files, SKUs named three ways. You find out why, fix it, and make the numbers trusted.
Crack business problems they've never answered. Which retailer actually makes money after trade spend? Can we call this month's wholesale close from open POs before it hits the books? Where is cash stuck in inventory? You frame the question, find the data that answers it, and get the answer into their hands.
Lead the engagement. Open every session with an agenda and what the customer will walk away with. Ask what decision they're trying to make before anything gets built. Close with owners and dates, and drive the plan until it runs without you.
Set up the foundation. Connect Shopify, Amazon, TikTok Shop, retailers, 3PLs, ad platforms and the books with customers and their agencies. Capture their account mappings, SKU conventions and naming so every answer comes back in their language.
Put AI to work. Tailor workflows from our library to the brand and schedule them to run on their own, in our app, in Claude or ChatGPT, or in the tools they build, with the right permissions.
Steer implementation partners. Brief partners on custom builds, keep them on schedule, and check their work before the customer sees it.
Turn field work into product. When a problem repeats across brands, build the fix into a reusable workflow with Claude Code and bring the evidence to the product team.

What "engineer" means here

This isn't a traditional software engineering role, and it isn't a sales role. You build every day, mostly with AI: Claude Code, skills and automated workflows, SQL against a brand's data, and light scripting when it's the fastest way through. The hard part is knowing what to build and why.

What success looks like

First 30 days: you shadow live engagements, learn our stack and workflow library, and run your first customer sessions with support.
By 90 days: you lead your own set of brands, each with trusted data and at least one problem solved that it couldn't solve before.
Ongoing: your brands get to value fast, use Drivepoint without us, and renew and expand. The patterns you find show up in the product.

What you bring

You know how a whole consumer brand works. Not just the P&L: channel economics, retail vs. DTC, trade spend, weeks of supply, CAC and retention, landed cost. You talk to a founder, an ops lead and a growth marketer in their own terms.
You think like a product person. You start from the user's problem and the outcome, you can tell when the ask isn't the need, and you notice when ten customers want the same thing.
You're consultative. You set agendas, ask the clarifying question everyone skipped, and turn a messy conversation into a crisp scope.
You build with AI. You use Claude Code or similar tools to build workflows, skills or agents that other people actually use. MCP, connectors and permissions don't scare you.
You're technical enough. You understand how data moves from Shopify to a warehouse to a report, can read SQL, and can figure out why two numbers don't match.
You're great with customers. Comfortable leading sessions with founders and execs; clear, warm, direct writing.
You keep many things moving. Several brands and partners at once, no dropped threads.
You're financially literate. You read a P&L and spot a forecast that doesn't make sense. You don't need to build three-statement models from scratch.

Nice to have

You've founded, launched or run a consumer brand
Consulting, agency or implementation background
SQL or BigQuery
Hands-on with Shopify, Amazon, retailer, 3PL or ad platform data
You've built an internal tool or app for a team