Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: Redwood City, CA (In-person, 5 days/week)

Experience: Engineer who has shipped customer-facing software and is comfortable embedding directly with non-technical users

Company: Waystation AI

Waystation is building the operating system for procurement in consumer packaged goods (CPG).

Every product starts with ingredients and packaging — and today, that work still runs through inboxes, PDFs, and spreadsheets. Procurement is mission-critical but opaque, manual, and painfully inefficient. It slows innovation, hides cost, and quietly destroys margin. Waystation replaces that chaos with an AI-powered platform that turns email-driven sourcing into structured data, visibility, and leverage — and it sits directly in existing supplier workflows, with no portals and no supplier logins.

The result is real ROI. One customer saved over $200,000 in the first three months, paying for their annual contract in the first 30 days.

Waystation is led by repeat founder and CEO Ryan Caldbeck (previously founded CircleUp) and backed by Founder Collective, Homebrew, Slow Ventures, and 87 Capital. We have paying customers, real usage, and a product that works.

A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is the person who makes Waystation work exactly the way each customer needs — by building.

Our customers are mid-market food, beverage, supplement, and pet food companies running complex sourcing operations: hundreds of suppliers, thousands of SKUs, RFPs that decide a year of margin. You'll embed in their procurement, QA, and R&D workflows, understand their world cold, and then write the integrations, configurations, automations, and agents that turn Waystation into measurable outcomes inside their environment.

This is half engineer, half operator. You're not filing tickets and waiting on the core team — you're shipping at the edge, in the customer's reality, and feeding what you learn back into the product so the whole platform gets sharper.

• Embed and diagnose. Sit inside a customer's sourcing operation, map how work actually flows, and find the highest-leverage place to create value — fast.

• Build at the edge. Stand up integrations, data pipelines, custom configurations, and workflow agents that fit each customer's operating model. Turn "the product can do that" into "it's live and they're using it."

• Make the product real. Get supplier email flowing through Waystation, get structured data into the hands of the people doing the work, and make sure it's being acted on — not sitting unread.

• Use AI as a force multiplier. Default to agents, automation, and AI-assisted development. You should out-build a team three times your size because of how you work, not how many hours you put in.

• Own the technical outcome end to end. Take whole problems off the table — activation gaps, data issues, integration friction — and close them without supervision.

• Close the loop with the core team. Turn recurring customer-specific work into product. What you build at the edge should make the next deployment faster for everyone.

We care more about judgment, customer empathy, and a defined edge than a perfect resume.

You're a strong fit if you:

• Ship fast with AI-assisted development. Cursor, Claude, Claude Code, and modern agents are table stakes, not a curiosity. (For context: we rejected 40% of 2025 engineering candidates for not working this way.)

• Have real customer empathy. You can sit with a procurement director and a QA lead, understand what they actually need, and translate it into something that works. You build for them, not for your own taste.

• Are relentlessly proactive. You see friction and fix it before anyone asks. You'd rather ship a fix than escalate a complaint.

• Own things end-to-end. You take ownership of the outcome — not just your slice of the code — and you hold yourself accountable for whether the customer actually got value.

• Operate in ambiguity. Unclear specs and changing requirements energize you. You move without waiting for permission.

• Have a sharp superpower. Strong early-stage engineers aren't evenly good at everything — they have one edge that makes them the go-to person. You know yours and can prove it with what you've shipped.

• Want to be in the room. In person, close to founders and customers, solving problems together.

• The customers you deploy are activated — the right people are in the product weekly, doing real work, with their data flowing.

• You've shipped customer-specific solutions that the founder couldn't have built and the core team didn't have to.

• The technical outcomes on your accounts are owned — integrations hold, issues get caught early, and value is visible heading into every renewal.

• The recurring work you hit has been turned into product or tooling that makes the next deployment faster.

• We are reliable, credible, and authentic

• We are solution-oriented

• We are proud of our work, our customers, and ourselves

• Competitive base salary + meaningful equity — real ownership, with upside tied directly to the outcomes you drive

• A defining seat in a new category of role — forward-deployed engineering is how AI-native companies win, and you'll help define what it means here

• A front-row seat to company building — direct, hands-on work with a repeat founder and CEO, and with the customers themselves

• A real product with real ROI — value you can measure, which makes every customer conversation more honest

• Full health, dental, and vision coverage

• Unlimited vacation — we care about outcomes, not hours

• An in-person team that values craft and ambition