Forward Deployed Engineer
Thorin · San Francisco
About Thorin
Today's enterprise software is better than ever, but most organizations still run on conversations rather than systems.
Critical work lives across Slack, email, meetings, documents, and people's heads. Existing tools depend on humans to manually update records, push projects forward, and make sure important work doesn't fall through the cracks.
We believe AI should do more.
Thorin is building proactive, long-horizon AI agents that continuously understand what is happening across an organization and help teams execute over weeks, months, and years. Rather than waiting for prompts, Thorin develops a living understanding of how a business actually operates.
Born out of 8VC's Build program and backed by one of Silicon Valley's strongest venture ecosystems, Thorin is building the operating system for the AI-native enterprise.
About the Role
Forward Deployed Engineers own end-to-end customer outcomes. You will work directly with customers, product, and engineering to understand business-critical workflows, get Thorin live in real operating environments, build the last-mile technical pieces that make deployments successful, and turn customer signal into durable product.
This is not a traditional solutions engineering, implementation, or support role. It is a product-centric engineering role for someone who can sit with executives and frontline users, find the real problem, design an AI-native workflow, prototype or build what is missing, and drive the deployment until the customer would be disappointed to lose Thorin.
What You’ll Do
Run customer discovery with executives, operators, and end users to understand goals, constraints, workflow reality, and adoption blockers.
Translate ambiguous customer needs into clear deployment plans, technical approaches, product requirements, evaluation criteria, and success metrics.
Build, prototype, script, integrate, prompt, and configure the last-mile technical work required to make Thorin useful in production.
Partner with engineering on integrations, permissions, data flows, LLM behavior, agentic task design, reliability, and edge cases.
Use deployments as product laboratories: identify what should become reusable core platform capability versus customer-specific glue.
Drive adoption across customer teams by building trust, teaching the product, troubleshooting issues, and creating a clear operating rhythm.
Represent customer truth inside Thorin with enough technical, product, and commercial clarity that the team can act quickly.
What We’re Looking For
Strong customer empathy and relationship judgment; you can earn trust with executives and users while getting to the real pain underneath the stated ask.
Business acumen; you understand customer incentives, workflow economics, expansion paths, and where Thorin can create the most leverage.
Structured problem-solving in ambiguity; you can break messy deployments into clear decisions, risks, milestones, owners, and next steps.
Hands-on technical ability; you can prototype and debug with APIs, scripts, data flows, integrations, prompts, evals, and modern AI tools.
AI-native product judgment; you understand how LLMs, agents, workflow automation, and product experience can solve real operating problems.
Execution velocity; you know when to prototype, escalate, cut scope, push for product investment, or make a pragmatic deployment call.
Clear communication with founders, customer executives, product, and engineering; you can disagree directly and constructively.
High ownership; you take ambiguous customer problems and drive them to deployed outcomes without waiting for perfect process.
Experience building or deploying software in a customer-facing, ambiguous environment; early-stage startup, FDE, product engineering, technical implementation, or founder/operator experience is especially relevant.
This Role Is Not For You If
You want a pure sales engineering role focused mainly on demos and answering technical questions.
You prefer a support or implementation role where product and engineering define the work for you.
You want a traditional backend role isolated from customers.
You are primarily interested in research or model work without responsibility for production customer value.
You need highly defined requirements, mature process, or a stable roadmap before you can operate effectively.
Benefits & Perks
100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage.
401(k).
$200/month wellness stipend.
$300/month transportation stipend.
$25/day lunch stipend.
$35/day coffee and snacks stipend.
$500/month developer tools budget.
Meaningful equity ownership in an early-stage company.
In-person collaboration with a high-ownership team in San Francisco.
A Note to Candidates
We know great people do not always match every bullet. If this role maps to the kind of work you want to do - building AI-native product in real customer environments, owning outcomes, and operating with urgency - we would like to hear from you.
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