The Forward Deployed Engineer will manage customer deployments, handling all aspects from initial contact to ensuring successful usage, including data engineering, backend services, frontend development, and customer training.
Forward Deployed Engineer
Location: Downtown San Francisco, in-person 5 days a week, with travel to customers
Comp: $120-180K total cash (incl. variable) plus founding-level equity
Risely is the AI workforce for higher education. We're growing rapidly amidst massive customer demnad.
We're hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to own customer deployments end to end.
You own the customer from the moment a contract is signed to the day the product is working inside their institution. Every layer of the stack that has to come together for that to happen is yours.
Every university is different. Their systems are messy, their data is partial, their workflows live in people's heads. The job is to walk into that environment, figure out what is actually true, and ship working software against it. Sometimes that means a Salesforce integration. Sometimes it means a custom React dashboard for a dean. Sometimes it means rewriting an agent's workflow at 11pm because tomorrow's launch needs it. You do all of it.
The pace is hours and days. A deployment that takes a quarter elsewhere takes us weeks here, and you are the reason that's true.
- Customer deployments end to end. You own the kickoff, the discovery, the technical design, the build, the launch, and the first weeks of usage. A deployment is yours from week one to working product.
- Data engineering. Map the customer's data, build the pipelines, normalize messy schemas across SIS, LMS, CRM, advancement, and finance systems. You handle missing fields, deduping, write-backs, syncs, and the long tail of edge cases that always show up in real institutions.
- Backend services. Build the APIs and integrations that sit between the customer's systems and our agents. Production code that runs reliably inside real institutions.
- Frontend work. Ship the dashboard the dean actually opens. Build the interfaces the advisors actually use. Customer-facing UI is part of the deployment, and you build it.
- Last-mile agents and workflows. Configure and customize agents for each customer's actual workflow. Tune prompts, define tools, set guardrails, wire up the workflows that match how this specific institution operates. Generic agents lose; customer-specific agents win.
- Launching with the customer. You run the go-live. Cutover plans, dry runs, rollback plans, sitting next to the customer on launch day. When something breaks at 7am, you diagnose, prototype, and ship. Sometimes within hours.
- Training the customer. Build the runbooks, train the end users, walk advisors and admins through the product, capture feedback in real time. A deployment is only successful when the customer can use it without you in the room.
- Feeding the platform. When you see the same customer-specific problem twice, you push it back to the platform team with the right framing so the third customer never has to wait.
A full-stack builder who actually likes customers. The kind of engineer who can sit in a working session with a dean and walk out knowing exactly what to ship by Friday.
- Strong across the stack. TypeScript, Python, React, Node, SQL. You debug a data pipeline, ship a frontend tweak, and design an API in the same day.
- Fluent with data. Real institutional data is messy, partial, and inconsistent. You map it, clean it, reconcile it, and turn it into something the agents can use.
- A shipper. A working version this week beats a perfect version next month. You move at the pace of the customer conversation and close loops fast.
- Customer-fluent. You translate institutional pain into code, and code back into something the customer trusts.
- AI-native. You orchestrate Claude Code agents alongside your own work. You have a real point of view on where agents add leverage and where humans still have to drive.
1-5 years of building full-stack production systems. You're joining the founding team and the upside reflects that.
Risely is a startup in the truest sense. We are all in. The pace is intense and the work is demanding, and the impact is real.
- In-person commitment. We're in the office together. Building at this stage takes full presence and full focus, and that often means evenings and the occasional Saturday.
- Speed and impact. Your work ships fast and reaches students and staff in days, not quarters.
- Mission clarity. Every line of code, every late night, every customer trip ties back to one purpose: helping students stay enrolled and helping colleges survive a generational shift.
- Ownership from week one. You'll make critical decisions and drive real outcomes from the start.
- Deep, meaningful work. You'll wrestle with data complexity, privacy regulations, and decades-old legacy systems. The problems are hard, and solving them changes how universities run.
If this excites you, join us at the ground floor. The work will stretch you and demand your best. It will also be the most meaningful work of your career.
Colleges are in trouble. One in three students drops out today, even after schools spend millions to recruit them. Overburdened staff comb through fragmented data by hand and miss the warning signs until it's too late.
We founded Risely to back the mission of higher education through the biggest systemic and technological shift the industry has ever faced. We build AI digital workers that handle the real operational work universities are drowning in: enrollment, advising, advancement, student services. We deploy them inside the systems institutions already use, and we make them work.
We're live and growing fast. Our customers include R1 research universities and various private colleges around the US. We're a small team, YC-backed, well-funded, and building like the future of higher ed depends on us.
Apply here and if you're really interested, email [email protected] with a paragraph on why this role and a link to something you've built.
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