Senior Forward Deployed Engineer
Varick Agents · SF
Senior Forward Deployed Engineer @ Varick Agents
ABOUT VARICK:
Varick builds AI agents that take over real operational workflows inside the world's largest enterprises. Our forward-deployed engineers and strategists embed with client teams to map how work gets done and build POCs, then our engineers bring those agents into production. We're venture-backed, revenue-generating from day one, and already in production inside several of these companies. You'll join an elite team from Meta, AWS Bedrock, Citadel Securities, McKinsey, BCG, Stanford, and more.
ABOUT THE ROLE:
Forward Deployed Engineers are the client-facing builders at Varick. You embed with enterprise stakeholders ranging from C-suite to operators on the ground. You conduct interviews with process leads, deploy process mining agents across systems of record, and iterate on agent POCs together with the client.
This is a role for people who communicate clearly, think like operators, and build like engineers. You sit across the table from a controller and map how the process actually runs (not merely how the documentation says it does), then you turn that into specs, prototypes, evals, and working agents. You don't need to be a distributed-systems engineer. You need to know what to build, prove that it works, and land it with the client.
You also need to be the person to bring the stakeholders along. You will co-create KPIs with leadership, co-create UI surfaces with process owners, and plan and execute change management initiatives.
There is an enormous difference between building a demo and running agents inside a Fortune 500 team. This role lives in that difference.
WHAT YOU'LL DO:
Embed with client teams across departments (from finance, sales, and IT to marketing, HR, and operations) to map how work gets done, step by step and system by system. Go beyond the golden path. Find the exceptions, the workarounds, and the impact of handoffs across teams for exception-handling
Translate ambiguous business problems into well-framed agent workflows with clear success criteria, guardrails, and an evaluation plan, using the latest Varick toolkits and process re-engineering solutions
Co-create KPIs with clients, identify ways to baseline them, and propose solutions for ongoing monitoring of post-deployment uplift
Drive adoption: train the client's team, sit with the users, watch what they actually do, and continuously iterate on the agents
Present findings, prototypes, and results directly to C-suite stakeholders. Top tier communication is a requirement for this role; simply being technical is not enough. If you don't have what it takes to command a room of the world's largest executives, you are not a good fit for this role
Codify what works into Varick's playbooks, skill files, and broader toolkit. Share field signal with our platform team: where the agents succeed, where they fail, what the model can't do yet, and what to build next
Build and leverage relationships with existing Varick clients to help them identify their biggest opportunities for additional AI transformation, whether that's more agentic initiatives within the same department or an expansion to a new department within the same org
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR:
The role combines 3 skillsets that are rare to find in 1 individual, and you need to be one of the best across all three: 1) Communication, 2) Analysis, and 3) Engineering. The list below highlights tactical examples of how you can show your experience across these.
A track record of solving hard, ambiguous problems for senior stakeholders and shipping the result, whether you got there as a SWE, product manager, consultant, banker, private equity investor, forward deployed engineer, or sales engineer. We care more about what you've built and owned than where you trained
AI-native. You use tools like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor every day; you've built with LLMs (prompt design, agents, evals), and you have a real point of view on what works and how to best use AI in your workflows. You can demonstrate this and argue well for your choices
Communication and client presence. You can hold a room of executives, push back on a controller without losing them, and tailor your depth to the audience. You communicate clearly and effectively, both async and sync, to any audience. You can explain topics at different altitude levels and switch between them effortlessly
Analytical with an extreme learning gradient. You have the rigor to put well-documented, well-researched answers in front of clients and colleagues. You pick up new topics almost instantly, whether a client is teaching you their workflow in an interview or a new technical advance demands you deepen what you know
Technical enough to build. You write Python or SQL comfortably, you've worked with APIs, you can read a data model and follow a trace, and you've shipped something real that people depended on: a product, an internal tool, a model, or an automation. You may have gotten there as an engineer, a technical PM, a sales engineer who built every demo, or a consultant or banker who taught yourself to ship agents on weekends
HELPFUL EXPERIENCE:
If you've mostly had technical roles but bring a proven communication and analytical edge, and working with C-suite stakeholders comes naturally to you:
Technical founder or early employee at a startup that sold into the enterprise
Technical Product Manager at a top-tier company
Forward Deployed Engineer or Implementation Engineer at a top-tier AI company
Sales Engineer or Solutions Architect at an enterprise software company
Senior SWE who wants to work closer to the customer and solve real problems in a compressed timeline
Data scientist or analytics lead who has worked directly with business stakeholders, owned a deliverable end to end, and shipped a model into a real workflow
Quant, trading, or research analyst from a top-tier firm
If you've mostly had non-technical roles but bring a technical understanding from other parts of your career or from your work on the side:
Product Manager at a top-tier company
Top-tier consulting, investment banking, or private equity
Deployment Strategist at a top-tier AI company
Founder or early employee at a startup that sold into the enterprise
Chief of Staff, BizOps, or corporate strategy at a high-growth company
CULTURE:
Extreme ownership. You own the tasks end-to-end, at an extreme level. You think beyond the task at hand, consider upstream and downstream impact, and are accountable for the entire outcome
An instinctual sense of urgency. You thrive in and help foster an environment with urgency. When a new request comes in, it is instinctually clear to you how that fits into the existing prioritization list. If it goes to the top of the list, you jump on it immediately, help the rest of the team realize the shift, and consider any impact of de-prioritizing other items
Low ego, high agency. We are all on this rocket ship together. If you win, the team wins and vice versa. You don't wait for permission to pursue a task. If you can do something that moves the needle, do it
Curious. Our work requires deep curiosity, both when it comes to understanding the clients' work and what matters to them, and when it comes to keeping up with and adopting the latest AI developments. Examples to showcase this could be pursuing niche interests, reading textbooks on the weekend, questioning the latest research, etc.
Perfectionist. You must be proud of your work product. In a client-facing business, it is critical that we put correct, well-informed, and well-documented material in front of the client. We are held to the highest standards and embody that mindset internally within Varick too
Startup mindset. Things are ambiguous. The hours are long. Weekend work is expected. And this excites you. With AI, the world is moving extremely quickly, and the ways of working are changing every day. We are at the forefront and help facilitate this rapid change. In the next 3, 5, and 10 years, things are going to change significantly, and you join to work hard and be a part of this exciting journey towards an AI-native future
Feedback metabolism. You never need the same correction twice, and you treat every review as compounding rather than criticism. You spot opportunities to give, and are comfortable giving, feedback to all of your peers, be it upward, downward, or horizontal
Competitive. You are here to win. You are driven by performing better than competitors, and by delivering outcomes that move the needle. Your background speaks to your competitive mindset with top performance in e.g., sports, eSports, former career, research, etc.
Based in SF or willing to relocate. On-site in our Financial District office. Comfortable with 20–40% travel to client sites
WHAT THIS ROLE ISN'T:
Not a pure software engineering role. If you want to spend your day inside the platform codebase, see our Product Engineer and Infrastructure Engineer postings
Not a pure strategy role. Our clients respect our AI-native, technical approach and repeatedly highlight how this sets us apart from consulting shops
Not a research role. You won't train or fine-tune models
Not implementation-by-checklist. Nobody hands you a configured product to roll out
WHY VARICK:
Early to the thesis. We bet on this category before it was obvious, and we're already working with multi-hundred-billion-dollar companies
Real ownership, not slide-deck purgatory. If you're tired of making recommendations that never get implemented, or spending a month polishing a deck no one reads, come build something that actually ships and runs
Direct access to operators and executives (C-suite, ops leads), with none of the layers, decks-for-decks-sake, or process overhead of a traditional firm
You own the full loop: find the problem, frame it, scope the solution, see it ship, see it run
Value creation in days, not quarters. An agent you scoped on Monday can be running against real invoices by the end of the month
The most AI-native way of working you'll find. We run an agent-driven workflow end to end, and we're building the FDE agent that will run the next version of this job. You'll help build it
High-bar team. Everyone here is someone you'll want to learn from: operators, engineers, and strategists at the top of their craft
Small, early team. Your judgment shapes the product, the playbooks, and how Varick scales
Meaningful equity at a stage where it still compounds
We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status. Employment is subject to a standard confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement.